David Grann · 352 pages
Rating: (57.1K votes)
“Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, "Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success--on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Exploration...no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward...”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the “savage” as European rather than as some native in the jungle.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things—things that most of us would never dare—who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“In 2006, members of a nomadic tribe called Nukak-Makú emerged from the Amazon in Colombia and announced that they were ready to join the modern world, though they were unaware that Colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an “exaggerated romance,” but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“But by 1925 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky’s “White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilizations were capable of springing up independently of each other.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“my experience is that when undergoing severe physical labor the mind is not at all active. One thinks of the particular problem in hand or perhaps the mind just wanders not performing coherent thought. As to missing various phases of civilized life, one has no time to miss anything save food or sleep or rest. In short one becomes little more than a rational animal.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“as Lynch pored over financial spreadsheets at work, he wondered: What if there really is a Z? What if the jungle had concealed such a place? Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. “These forests are . . . almost the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind,” John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians and a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote. Sydney Possuelo, who was in charge of the Brazilian department set up to protect Indian tribes, has said of these groups, “No one knows for sure who they are, where they are, how many they are, and what languages they speak.” In 2006, members of a nomadic tribe called Nukak-Makú emerged from the Amazon in Colombia and announced that they were ready to join the modern world, though they were unaware that Colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“abstinence pamphlets disseminated in the countryside instructing mothers to “keep a watchful eye on the hayfields.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“Fawcett, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer recognized the wilderness of bombed-out villages, denuded trees, craters, and sunbaked skeletons. As Lyne wrote in his diary, “Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory.”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
“(Brian) Fawcett himself had scribbled in a letter to a friend, 'Those whom the gods intend to destroy they first make mad!”
― David Grann, quote from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
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“Hire myself out to whom? What beast must I worship? What sacred images should I destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lies am I supposed to believe? March through whose blood?”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“and nominally a cigar manufacturer. He never came to the club except on nights like this, when Mr. and Mrs. Ammermann would entertain a few of their—her—friends at a smaller table. Mildred, towering above Losch, the club steward, and pointing, daintily for her, with one finger as she held a small stack of place-cards in her left hand, apparently was one woman who had not heard about the business of the night before. It was axiomatic in Gibbsville that you could tell Mill Ammermann anything and be sure it wouldn’t be repeated; because Mill probably was thinking of the mashie-niblick approach over the trees to the second green. Julian derived some courage from her smile. He always had liked Mill anyway. He was fragmentarily glad over again that Mill did not live in New York, for in New York she would have been marked Lesbian on sight.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...]
Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?"
"Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Jesus' Son
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