The House of Twenty Thousand Books Quotes

“Like a man who pinches himself to make sure he still has feeling, Chimen read to reassure himself that he was still alive.”
― Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books

“Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.”
― Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books

“Pascal had formulated a famous wager in favor of the existence of God: If you bet there is no God and you are wrong, a wrathful deity is likely to condemn your eternal soul to hellfire; but if you gamble that there is a God and there is not, your consciousness will cease to exist upon your death and you will never know that you were wrong.”
― Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books

“How could so many people, believing so passionately in the language of universalism, so quick to latch onto the language of justice in their arguments, make such appalling political choices regarding whom they trusted and what political institutions they supported? . . . At least in part, the answer must remain somewhat metaphysical. It was the zeitgeist, the atmosphere of the times, the immediacy of history -- a time when history was seen as a living, breathing, pulsating entity . . . It was part of a search for certainty, unfathomable with hindsight but at the times was all too easy to fall into . . . For the writer Arthur Koestler, embracing Marxism allowed him to think that 'the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke . . . Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.”
― Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books