Russell Shorto · 384 pages
Rating: (6.6K votes)
“It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years’ time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
“It was the Dutch of this era who invented the idea of the home as a personal, intimate space; one might say they invented coziness.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
“This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration—when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
“Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
Russell Shorto
Born place: Johnstown, Pennsylvania, The United States
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“Vete al comedor, da una vuelta alrededor de la mesa mirado siempre su centro, y cuando hayas concluido el paseo circular, habrás dado una vuelta alrededor de ti mismo, puesto que la vista habrá recorrido todos los puntos del comedor. Pues bien, el comedor es el Cielo, la mesa es la Tierra y tú eres la Luna.”
― Jules Verne, quote from From the Earth to the Moon
“Oh, who was she kidding? She wasn’t fucking lucky. But hope sprang eternal, for whatever stupid reason.”
― Stacia Kane, quote from City of Ghosts
“Ego vos mergam, nec merger a vobis. I sink you, that I will not be sunk by you.”
― Stacia Kane, quote from Unholy Magic
“Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from The Design of Everyday Things
“I know what the majority of you think about all this. All this sex and money and drugs. You think: people who live like that never end up happy. You need to think that in just the way men with small penises need to think size doesn't matter. It's understandable. The rich, the famous, the big-dicked, the slim-and-gorgeous - they can incite an envy so urgent that you can escape it only by translating it into pity. People who live like that never end up happy. Yes, you're right. But neither do you. And in the meantime, they've had all the sex and drugs and money.”
― Glen Duncan, quote from I, Lucifer
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