Quotes from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“But remember. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't real.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees an shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Just because you don't believe it[] [...]doesn't mean that it's not true.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“...You can have this whole entire life, with all your opinions, your loves, your fears. Eventually those parts of you disappear. And then the people who could remember those parts of you disappear, and before long, all that's left is your name in some ledger. This...person -- she had a favorite food. She had friends and people she disliked. We don't even know how she died...I guess that's why I like preservation better than history. In preservation I feel like I can keep some of it from slipping away.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“The philosophers stone is just an allegory. It represents everything that man wants and can never have.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Everyone has wounds as want healing. Seems like they all find me.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Mentally Connie gathered her strands of thinking into thick handfuls, trying to braid them into a coherent whole.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“God shields the souls of the innocent the best He can from the Devil's torments.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school. And if you get it wrong, they kick you out,” she said. He fixed her with a look of barely contained awe while she stirred the salad around her plate with the tines of her fork. She smiled at him. Part of learning to be a professor was learning to behave in a professorial way. Thomas could not be permitted to see how afraid she was. The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice. More infamously, the exam can also be the scene of spectacular intellectual carnage, as the unprepared student—conscious but powerless—witnesses her own professional vivisection. Either way, she will be forced to face her inadequacies. Connie was a careful, precise young woman, not given to leaving anything to chance. As she pushed the half-eaten salad across the table away from the worshipful Thomas, she told herself that she was as prepared as it was possible to be. In her mind ranged whole shelvesful of books, annotated and bookmarked, and as she set aside her luncheon fork she roamed through the shelves of her acquired knowledge, quizzing herself. Where are the economics books? Here. And the books on costume and material culture? One shelf over, on the left. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. But what if she was not prepared enough? The first wave of nausea contorted her stomach, and her face grew paler. Every year, it happened to someone. For years she had heard the whispers about students who had cracked, run sobbing from the examination room, their academic careers over before they had even begun. There were really only two ways that this could go. Her performance today could, in theory, raise her significantly in departmental regard. Today, if she handled herself correctly, she would be one step closer to becoming a professor. Or she would look in the shelves”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“None on the Court be well disposed to the hearing of reason,I'm afraid. They are gripped with fear for their own reputations.”
― Katherine Howe, quote from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

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“English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.”
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― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.”
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“When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism – there was no alternative – and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare.

There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communism states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union.

As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West – Europe and the United States above all – missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.”
― Tony Judt, quote from Ill Fares the Land

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