496 pages
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“Years later, (Paul) Jones described the mental gymnastics that went into writing these scripts. "Every evening I would close my eyes in a quiet place in my apartment ... I would visualize the opening and walk myself through the day and imagine the different emotional states the market would go through... Then when you get there, you are ready for it. You have been there before. You are in a mental state to take advantage of emotional extremes because you have already lived through them.”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“He read Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli.”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“He commuted to his Canadian office in a Ferrari, though sometimes snowy conditions forced him to use Bentley.”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“All new markets are inefficient at first,”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb the consequences of the risks that they take on.”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“Edward Crosby Johnson II, who in the 1950s established Fidelity as a dominant investment firm and made the same point in his own way: “The market is like a beautiful woman—endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying. I have been absorbed and immersed since 1924 and I know this is no science. It is an art…. It is personal intuition.”
― quote from More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
― quote from The Dhammapada
“So...what are you working on now?"
“Right now, an essay about Don Quixote.”
“One of my favorite books.”
“Mine too.”
“What’s the gist?”
“It has to do with the authorship of the books.”
“Is there any question?”
“I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing.”
“Ah.”
“Cervantes claims he is not the author, that the original text was in Arabic.”
“Right. It’s an attack on make-believe, so he must claim it was real.”
“Precisely. Therefore, the story has to be written by an eyewitness yet Cid Hamete Benengeli, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. So who is he? Sancho Panza is of course the witness – illiterate, but with a gift for language. He dictated the story to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote’s friends. They had the manuscript translated into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation and had it rendered back into Spanish. The idea was to hold up a mirror to Don Quixote’s madness so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways. But Don Quixote, in my view, was no mad. He only pretended to be. He engineered the collaboration, and the translation from Arabic back into Spanish. I like to imagine Cervantes hiring Don Quixote in disguise to decipher the story of Don Quixote.”
“But why did Quixote go to such lengths?”
“He wanted to test the gullibility of man. To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies, lies, and nonsense if they gave them amusement? The answer: to any extent. For the book is still amusing us today. That’s finally all anyone wants out of a book. To be amused.”
― Paul Auster, quote from City of Glass
“[The theory of universal gravitation] is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth. . . Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right?”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Nightfall
“Only Loki was not a fighter. Only Loki stood at the sides and laughed, a laughter more deadly to the self-important gods than any sword or spear. No wonder they had chained him.”
― M.D. Lachlan, quote from Wolfsangel
“Just don’t give up on us. Please, don’t give up. I’m a shell without you, Alayna. I can barely breathe when you aren’t near me, when I’m not touching you.”
― Laurelin Paige, quote from Found in You
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