Quotes from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Creation unfolds, around us, despite us and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it "love”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan't give you another chance.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Don't let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“I could tell you a hundred things, thinks Jacob, and nothing at all.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form.
She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed …
… and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn.
She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.
Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes.
Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows.
A well-waxed paper door slides open.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“We were, to quote the proverb,
"The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something...”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“I find a certain comfort," confesses Marinus, "in humanity's helplessness.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Dust is gold in the light of dawn.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Killing depends on circumstances, as you'd expect, whether it's a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honor or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it's the first that matters. It's a man's first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Loyalty looks simple... but it ain't.”
― David Mitchell, quote from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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Popular quotes

“A high tower, like Rapunzel's, but this has no windows, nowhere to lower my hair.”
― Teri Terry, quote from Slated

“Where am I?" Magnus croaked.
"Nazca."
"Oh, so we went on a little trip."
"You broke into a man's house," Catarina said. "You stole a carpet and enchanted it to fly. Then you sped off into the night air. We pursued you on foot."
"Ah," said Magnus.
"You were shouting some things."
"What things?"
"I prefer not to repeat them," Catarina said. "I also prefer not to remember the time we spent in the desert. It is a mammoth desert, Magnus. Ordinary deserts are quite large. Mammoth deserts are so called because they are larger than ordinary deserts."
"Thank you for that interesting and enlightening information," Magnus croaked.
"You told us to leave you in the desert, because you planned to start a new life as a cactus," Catarina said, her voice flat. "Then you conjured up tiny needles and threw them at us. With pinpoint accuracy."
"Well," he said with dignity. "Considering my highly intoxicated state, you must have been impressed with my aim."
"'Impressed' is not the word to use to describe how I felt last night, Magnus."
"I thank you for stopping me there," Magnus said. "It was for the best. You are a true friend. No harm done. Let's say no more about it. Could you possibly fetch me - "
"Oh, we couldn't stop you," Catarina interrupted. "We tried, but you giggled, leaped onto the carpet, and flew away again. You kept saying that you wanted to go to Moquegua."
"What did I do in Moquegua?"
"You never got there," Catarina said. "But you were flying about and yelling and trying to, ahem, write messages for us with your carpet in the sky."
"We then stopped for a meal," Catarina said. "You were most insistent that we try a local specialty that you called cuy. We actually had a very pleasant meal, even though you were still very drunk."
"I'm sure I must have been sobering up at that point," Magnus argued.
"Magnus, you were trying to flirt with your own plate."
"I'm a very open-minded sort of fellow!"
"Ragnor is not," Catarina said. "When he found out that you were feeding us guinea pigs, he hit you over the head with your plate. It broke."
"So ended our love," Magnus said. "Ah, well. It would never have worked between me and the plate anyway. I'm sure the food did me good, Catarina, and you were very good to feed me and put me to bed - "
Catarina shook her head."You fell down on the floor. Honestly, we thought it best to leave you sleeping on the ground. We thought you would remain there for some time, but we took our eyes off you for one minute, and then you scuttled off. Ragnor claims he saw you making for the carpet, crawling like a huge demented crab.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from The Bane Chronicles

“There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.”
― Mindy Kaling, quote from Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”
― Thomas Harris, quote from Hannibal

“I’m gonna take a nap, Heaven,” he said, wanting away from her to clear his head. He didn’t like feeling uncomfortable in his house.
“Haven,” she corrected him as he started to walk away.
“I know,” he said. “I kinda like Heaven though.”
She turned to him, and their eyes met for the first time since he’d walked into the room. “Me, too.”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Sempre

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