Joseph Duncan · 270 pages
Rating: (725 votes)
“In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I believed in the spirits of my ancestors.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“No child is ever loved as they are loved by the ones who gave them life.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have always found it both bitter and sweet that men become childlike in their old age.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have visited a great many cathedrals and have yet to burst into flames.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“We worshiped our ancestors. We believed in the spirits of men and animals,”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“Sometimes I think it is that loneliness that drove our species a little bit insane. Why else would we have invented such a vast assortment of preposterous characters, all those pantheons of mad gods and uncountable legions of angels and devils and supernatural dream-things, if not to fill the void”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, quote from The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
“The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever.”
― Thucydides, quote from History of the Peloponnesian War
“One should never offend more men than one can persuade,”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had”
― Tad Williams, quote from City of Golden Shadow
“Swine are held by the Egyptians to be unclean beasts. In the first place, if an Egyptian touches a hog in passing, he goes to the river and dips himself in it, clothed as he is; and in the second place, swineherds, though native born Egyptians, are alone of all men forbidden to enter any Egyptian temple; nor will any give a swineherd his daughter in marriage, nor take a wife from their women; but swineherds intermarry among themselves. [2] Nor do the Egyptians think it right to sacrifice swine to any god except the Moon and Dionysus; to these, they sacrifice their swine at the same time, in the same season of full moon; then they eat the meat. The Egyptians have an explanation of why they sacrifice swine at this festival, yet abominate them at others; I know it, but it is not fitting that I relate it. [3] But this is how they sacrifice swine to the Moon: the sacrificer lays the end of the tail and the spleen and the caul together and covers them up with all the fat that he finds around the belly, then consigns it all to the fire; as for the rest of the flesh, they eat it at the time of full moon when they sacrifice the victim; but they will not taste it on any other day. Poor men, with but slender means, mold swine out of dough, which they then take and sacrifice. (2:47)”
― Herodotus, quote from The Histories
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