“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“He also made all Muslims publicly forswear that part of their Holy Quran which permits them to dupe, cheat and kill all who are not of Islam.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The wise man shall pass into strange countries, and good and evil shall he try in all things.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty. And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“A man will believe anything that does not cost him anything,” said”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“A life entirely devoted to the avoidance of wrong seldom achieves anything exceptionally right—or anything at all.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“One reason I didn’t hold any grudges or harsh feelings toward Dad must have been that my mother seldom blamed him—at least not to us or in our hearing. I can hardly think of a time when she spoke against him.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
“Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are “sex-negative” without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“You haven't stopped smiling since you came in."
"You want me to yell?"
"No, no," Buddy hastily assured him. "You just keep right on smiling." He picked delicately at the remaining pie. "You sure did sleep late today."
Tate grinned at him. "Yep."
"Didn't go fishing, either."
"Nope."
"Sure was a lot of tromping around going on upstairs a few minutes ago. What were you doing?"
"Just moving a few things." Tate took a drink of coffee.
"What things?"
He was beginning to wish he'd strangled Buddy at birth. "My things."
"Were you moving them somewhere in particular, or just dragging them up and down the hall for the exercise?"
Tate ground his teeth together. "I was moving them to Abby's room."
"Oh." Buddy gave a half grin. "Can I have some money?"
"No." Tate glared at him.
"Well, it was worth a shot. I should have asked while you were still smiling.”
― Katherine Allred, quote from What Price Paradise
“problems involved when Passover, which is the festival of spring, occurs in the summer. Briefly, she explained it to Elijah. The Hebrew calendar, which is theoretically based on the lunar month, consists of twelve months. That, however, only adds up to 354 days, whereas the solar calendar consists of 365 days, making a discrepancy of 11 days a year. In order to align the two, an extra month is added to some Hebrew years, for a total of seven months, over a cycle of nineteen years.”
― Nathan Erez, quote from The Kabbalistic Murder Code
“Sometimes you can get a shark to eat itself if you fill the water with enough blood.”
― Shane Kuhn, quote from The Intern's Handbook
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