The Fire Seekers Quotes

“That night I make my special pasta carbonara. You fry fresh rosemary in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and insane amounts of finely chopped garlic. Add a little chopped pancetta, then make the sauce by adding a pint of whole milk and curdling it with a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil it down for ten minutes, and mix in a couple of beaten eggs right at the end. Sprinkle on some finely shaved fresh parmesan—never the pre-grated stuff—and coarsely ground black pepper. Good stuff. When I ask Dad the significance of Nineveh, he’s so excited that he can’t stop talking even with long thin worms of sauce-flecked spaghettini burrowing greedily into his mouth. “Ashurbanipal. Assyrian”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“like all mathematicians, I think there must be something else, powerful and ghostly and unseen, that lies beneath the surface of the physical world. Numbers are just one of several things that don’t make sense otherwise. Your father studies the painting. And that’s fine. But I’m interested in the canvas under the paint.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Americans call it a cell. A small locked room from which you can’t escape! We Brits call it a mobile—a colorful toy you suspend over a drooling infant’s crib.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“A body is a body. Without consciousness, we are pieces of meat. Nothing to discuss.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“If this is real, then everything we thought we knew about human civilization—the origin of cities, religion, language itself—it’s just frost on the windowpane.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Nutty as the inside of a squirrel.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“traffic—when overtaking a slow truck on a blind curve, his safety technique is a muttered prayer.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“recall Rosko, hunched over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles, saying, “That’s the big puzzle. Why is pain, you know, painful?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Seattle’s oldest cemetery, where the city’s founders are permanently surprised to find themselves rotting right alongside martial arts hero Bruce Lee.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“He has the common weakness of fathers—he wants to feel close to me, wants to understand me, and wants the easy road to that result, which is me being more like him than I am.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“And the amazing twist is that, like all abused and abandoned children, we’re convinced the whole thing’s our fault!” “I think—” “Spooky, isn’t it, the way some of those ideas keep on coming up all over the world in different forms?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Babel’s a story about parenting gone wrong, isn’t it? Actually, I think religion’s a story about parenting gone wrong. The gods create us, protect us, then try to keep us amused with cool toys like reason and language. But”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“We became arrogant, and built this great tower, and the Creator was so cheesed off with us that he said, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done. Screw you!’ So he destroyed the tower and put the angelic language through the shredder.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“all the way up to heaven and”—he stabs his finger at the ceiling—“poked God in the butt.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Genesis, chapter eleven. We came down, into the plain of Shinar, and said, ‘Hot damn, let’s show off how clever we are!’ So we built ourselves a fine city, and put a bodacious skyscraper in the middle. And yea verily, we did the whole thing in mirrored glass, and installed high-speed elevators, and AC, and an underground garage with valet parking.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“What I’m actually craving is tea—specifically, the British blend Mom gave me a taste for. Wickedly strong black Assam, steeped in boiling water for five full minutes”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“pasta carbonara. You fry fresh rosemary in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and insane amounts of finely chopped garlic. Add a little chopped pancetta, then make the sauce by adding a pint of whole milk and curdling it with a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil it down for ten minutes, and mix in a couple of beaten eggs right at the end. Sprinkle on some finely shaved fresh parmesan—never the pre-grated stuff—and coarsely ground black pepper.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“So when did consciousness show up? Where did it come from? What is it? And how is it possible?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Don’t be arrogant. Don’t assume the big surprises are all behind us.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“The best part of assembling this pack was discovering how many smart nonfiction writers—people actually investigating what’s true—committed the foolish error of leaving all their best ideas just lying around in books, from where I could easily steal them.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“But it’s the same story over and over, in more cultures than you can count. God meets girl. Every single time, the result is crazy sex and a child who’s a half-divine miracle-worker. We tend to forget that it’s the Christian story too.” “Except in Christianity they skip the sex.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“You know, sometimes evidence is puzzling. But being puzzled is a bad reason to run around shrieking with your hands in the air, like frightened children. It’s also a bad reason for surrendering your judgment to someone whose main claim to expertise is that he wears funny clothes and stares out of the window a lot.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“I figure out right away that people think they know what grief is, even if they’ve never really experienced it.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Bacteria are not conscious. But we are, and we evolved from them. So when did consciousness show up? Where did it come from? What is it? And how is it possible?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“For Aidan and Declan   A father may be forgiven, perhaps, for wishing upon his sons the richest, most dazzling, most extravagant success of all—a life well lived.   So, like, no pressure or anything.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“being angry and afraid concentrates the mind wonderfully, as some English literary heavy once said.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Dad thinks religion’s a communicable mental illness, says so as often as possible, claims church services bring him out in hives, and refuses on principle to attend any, ever.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers