The Egyptologist Quotes

“In my experience of human behaviour (and I've seen all there is to see, it's fair to say), I've concluded there aren't but five motivations for a man to do anything. They're hardly mysterious, you know: money, hunger, lust, power, survival. That's all there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if you listen hard, it's all just the same five balls, juggled up in the air, decorated with distracting words. No one ever did a damn thing but for one of those five.”
― Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist

“Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this culture of death?" Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cataclysmic catechism: "Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse nailed to bits of wood."

... Egypt was not — I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it — a culture of death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and cobra-queens. The Egyptians were the inventors of immortality, the first men who saw they could live forever.”
― Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist

“... the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey.”
― Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist