The Golden Specific Quotes

“Was this always part of growing older? Sophia wondered. Perhaps it was: realizing the world was not obliged to give you what you wanted, and more importantly, deciding what you would do and how you would feel once the realization arrived. Would you sit back and resent the world? Would you make peace with it, and accept the unfairness without rancor? Or would you try to find and take what the world had not provided? Maybe all three, she reflected, at different moments.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“Was this always part of growing older? Sophia wondered. Perhaps it was: realizing the world was not obliged to give you what you wanted, and, more importantly, deciding what you would do and how you would feel once the realization arrived. Would you sit back and resent the world? Would you make peace with it, and accept the unfairness without rancor? Or would you try to find and take what the world had not provided? Maybe all three, she reflected, at different moments.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“It is difficult for us to grasp the peculiar glamour and significance the yellow metal held for the conquistadores. We respond instantly to the cool irony of a Hernán Cortés explaining to a Mexican chief that Spaniards suffer from a disease of the heart, for which gold is the only specific; but in that coolness and irony, as in almost everything else, Cortés is atypical. —Inga Clendinnen,
Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“There is a certain kind of person who, from many years of being bullied, becomes convinced that bullies run the world, and that if they run the world they must have a right to run the world, and that if they have a right to run the world they must be running it as it is supposed to run.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“We are all, to some degree, dulled in our senses and our experience of the world. We are all, to some degree, suppressed by layers of accumulated grief. My unmarred features belie the gradual dulling of all those faculties that should animate a human being. We are all, to some degree, faceless.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“A golden specific in a dark Age. The most beautiful remedy for the most brutal plague.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific