“It was perfectly horrible. But it was perfect.”
“Luca’s freedom was at the tips of her fingers.”
“Sit down. Have a drink. I promise to escort you safely back to your satin sheets once we’ve gotten reacquainted.”
“Falco’s jaw tightened. “I feel sorry for you, Cass. But eventually you’re going to have to accept the fact that da Peraga is going to die.” His eyes flashed dark in the flickering candlelight. “Sometimes I wish that day would hurry up and get here, so that I could have my starling back.”
“Cass tried to imagine Luca gone, but couldn’t. Even when he had been in France studying, he had always lingered in the back of her mind, his letters arriving with almost mechanical regularity. Even though Cass had spent most of her life away from him, she couldn’t fathom being completely and utterly without him. He was her future, a promise left to her by her parents: a life that was safe, steady, dependable.”
“the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.”
“How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.”
“The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.”
“Shermy: Men are better than women!
Patty: They are not!!
Shermy: Washington was a man! Jefferson was a man! Lincoln was a man!
Patty: Your mother is a woman!!
Shermy: You got me!”
“The obvious question is, what are the “conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted”? As it turns out, what Donaldson assumed in 1919 is still the conventional wisdom today: our genes were effectively shaped by the two and a half million years during which our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers prior to the introduction of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. This is a period of time known as the Paleolithic era or, less technically, as the Stone Age, because it begins with the development of the first stone tools. It constitutes more than 99.5 percent of human history—more than a hundred thousand generations of humanity living as hunter-gatherers, compared with the six hundred succeeding generations of farmers or the ten generations that have lived in the industrial age.
It’s not controversial to say that the agricultural period—the last .5 percent of the history of our species—has had little significant effect on our genetic makeup. What is significant is what we ate during the two and a half million years that preceded agriculture—the Paleolithic era. The question can never be answered definitively, because this era, after all, preceded human record-keeping. The best we can do is what nutritional anthropologists began doing in the mid-1980s—use modern-day hunter-gatherer societies as surrogates for our Stone Age ancestors.”
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