Edward Rutherfurd · 945 pages
Rating: (9.8K votes)
“as I said,I believe in fate.Things happen as they are meant to be.We just have to recognize our destiny.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from Russka: the Novel of Russia
“—Dicen —explicó el boyardo de Vladímir— que Alejandro ha dejado instrucciones a su familia para que le den Moscú cuando sea mayor. —¡Moscú! ¡Esa ciudad miserable! —No es gran cosa —convino el otro—, aunque no está mal situada.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from Russka: the Novel of Russia
“But, she smiled, it seems to me he has a warm heart.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from Russka: the Novel of Russia
“The answer to Russia's problems lies here, in Russia. . . . The church is the key. If Russia's guiding force is not religion, then her people will be listless. We can have Western laws, independent judges, perhaps even parliaments -- but only if they grow gradually out of a spiritual renewal. That has to come first.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from Russka: the Novel of Russia
“From dawn each day the boats traveled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead. While on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the riverbank to greet them.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from Russka: the Novel of Russia
Edward Rutherfurd
Born place: in Salisbury, England, The United Kingdom
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“You know it’s going to be a bad day when you can’t get privacy inside your own head.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from Magic Lost, Trouble Found
“You poets are accustomed to finding words for everything beautiful and you don’t even grant that people have hearts if they are less talkative about their feelings than you.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind
“Vic didn’t mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from Deep Water
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.
But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.
My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
“The spirit of hate, the anti-Christ, is contention, strife, fault-finding, lovers of self, lovers of praise. Those are the anti-Christ, and take possession of groups, masses, and show themselves even in the lives of men.30”
― David Wilcock, quote from The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies
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