Cabinet Of Curiosities Quotes

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid.

In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.

It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.

One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.

Not one of us knows what we can do, until one fine day, we stand up and do it.

Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act.

I’m afraid I don’t suffer petty bureaucrats gladly. A very bad habit, but one I find hard to break. Nevertheless, you will find, Dr. Kelly, that humiliation and blackmail, when used judiciously, can be marvelously effective

A key piece of advice from Hermosillo was to have faith in oneself. He would often tell Guillermo, “If a road is not presented, you build one.

Old books, the kind that give off the smell of dust and decay, an odor Balastair associates with the scent of pure knowledge. Knowledge of new things. Knowledge of new places. Every book a doorway—a cabinet of curiosities opening to a new land.

He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims' mail.

The Greek word for "rooster" is built from combined parts that mean "getter out of bed".

Look at me." Rosalind speaks very quietly. "Look at the way I choose to live. Ask yourself just how tough a person has to be to live like this.

Rod Serling once observed, “The greatest fear of all is fear of the unknown, which you can’t share with others.

The laws are like spiders’ webs: just as spiders’ webs catch the weaker creatures but let the stronger ones through, so the humble and poor are restricted by the laws, but the rich and powerful are not bound by them (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 7.2 ext. 14).

There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.

We are all insane to one degree or another, and the most functional of us merely hides it the best.

They are practical, and practical is beautiful.

...here on Coney Island, we learn to take each other as we are.

If you’re honest with yourself, you can still feel the terrible weight of time pressing on you; that awful, relentless, bodily corruption that is happening constantly to us all.

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.

Sad fact is, it doesn't take much to amuse most people. But this is what you need to understand: any good confidence game is built on two pillars - what people want and what they fear.

Morbid, but not passive. “I was speaking at a film school in Hollywood, and I said to them, ‘Go have a life. Live. Get laid, get into a bar fight. Get knifed in the fucking thorax. Lose all your money. Make all your money back. Jump into a train.’ When I was just a child, I was observing the world, but I lived a lot, too. We used to break into abandoned houses. We explored the entire sewer system of Guadalajara on foot. And then I became really crazy as a teenager.

occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros Rehashed cabbage is the death of wretched teachers. Juvenal Satires 7.154, criticizing the repetitive dullness of the highly conservative and unimaginative school curriculum

And I really loved sculpting. My brother and I would do full human figures with clay and Plasticine—liver, intestines, the heart—fill them with ketchup and throw them from the roof. So I was an artistic but very morbid kid.

To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms we see nowadays in which are collected and mingled the furniture of all times and countries. Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own—a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris, as if the end of the world were at hand.

PEE-WEE BOXER SURVEYED THE JOBSITE WITH DISGUST. THE FOREMAN was a scumbag. The crew were a bunch of losers. Worst of all, the guy handling the Cat didn't know jack about hydraulic excavators. Maybe it was a union thing; maybe he was friends with somebody; either way, he was jerking the machine around like it was his first day at Queens Vo-Tech

The least successful athletes, those who have never won any victories, suddenly call themselves trainers.

perfectly ordinary things turned eerie and strange.

I was someone who questioned. I was someone who probed. I was someone who looked under rocks and peeked into medicine cabinets.

Del Toro wearing sculpted and molded gelatin makeup, including fake hair and acrylic dentures and gums.

Did you know that all ladies at Louis XIV’s court at Versailles were required to have a thirteen-inch waist or less? And that their dresses weighed between thirty and forty pounds?

Memory is your museum, your cabinet of curiosities, your 'Wunderkammer.' It will never be full; there is always room for something new and strange and marvelous. It will never need dusting. It will last as long as you do. You can't let the public in to walk around it, but you can take out the exhibits and share them, share what you know. You will never be able to stop collecting.

The light in the room grew abruptly brighter. Smithback’s pulse began to race wildly, faster and faster, until the table beneath him seemed almost to rock in time with the frantic beating of his heart.

Normally my clients were my mother, my grandmother, and my dad, and I would sell them the issues with a great color cover. There was a story I remember called ‘The Invader,’ and it had an invisible dome covering a city, with a giant tentacled monster eating everybody in sight, and people trying to drill a hole in the dome. And I did these epic Prismacolor pencil illustrations and sold out the three issues to my captive audience.

Boxer altered his course subtly, as if that was the way he'd already been going, not looking up to acknowledge he had heard, letting his attitude convey the contempt he felt for the scrawny foreman. He stopped in front of the guy, staring at the man's dusty little workboots. Small feet, small dick. Slowly, he glanced up. "Welcome to the world, Pee-Wee. Take a look at this.

Sue stepped into a haven that smelled of candles and lemon-scented dish soap, a cabinet of curiosities, one of which was the bathtub smack dab in the middle of the small kitchen. Bob Roy’s railroad flat was four tight, connected rooms, each stuffed with koombies, knickknacks, doodads, furniture pieces of any style, shelves, books, photos in frames, trophies bought from flea markets, old records, small lamps, and calendars from decades before. “I know,” he said. “It looks like I sell magic potions in here, like I’m an animated badger from a Disney cartoon.” He lit a burner on the stove with a huge kitchen match, then filled a shiny, Olde English–style kettle with water from the tap. As he prepared cups on a tray he said, “Tea in minutes, titmouse. Make a home for yourself.

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies, and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages, and, like a better man than myself, have 'small Latin and less Greek'. I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers - not from the circumstance of my being town-born - for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it, 'on Devon's leafy shores' - and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tool, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance - but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious, and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess that—perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man… . Then suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph… .

Barzellette matematiche I (*) Un biologo, uno statistico e un matematico sono seduti un caffè e guardano alla gente che passa. Un uomo e una donna entrano in un palazzo dall'altra parte della strada. Dieci minuti dopo ne escono accompagnati da un bambino. "Si sono riprodotti" dice il biologo. "No" ribatte lo statistico. "È un errore nell'osservazione. In media sono sia entrate sia uscite due persone mezza". "No, no, no" interviene il matematico. "È del tutto ovvio. Se adesso entra qualcuno, il palazzo sarà vuoto". (*) Lo scopo principale di queste barzellette non è farvi ridere, ma mostrarvi che cos'è che fa ridere i matematici e consentirvi di sbirciare in un angolo oscuro del loro ambiente culturale.

She's always sniffing the bottles in the spice cabinet." I didn't know she'd even noticed. At first it was just curiosity; why did fennel and cumin, identical twins, have such opposing personalities? I had crushed the seeds beneath my fingertips, where the scents lingered for hours. Another day I'd opened a bottle of nutmeg, startled when the little spheres came rattling out in a mothball-scented cloud. How could something so delicate have such a ferocious smell? And I watched, fascinated, as the supple, plump, purple vanilla beans withered into brittle pods and surrendered their perfume to the air. The spices were all so interesting; it was impossible to walk through the kitchen without opening the cupboard to find out what was going on in there.

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.... (Book I, Ch. 1) I shall never go back, I said to myself. A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle. "I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses." I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue." (Book II, Ch. 1)

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.... (Book I, Ch. 1) I shall never go back, I said to myself. A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle. "I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses." I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue." (Book II, Ch. 1)

Fatigued by her journey, the Countess soon after supper proposed retiring to rest; a proposal extremely agreeable to Madeline, whose spirits still felt agitated. The Countess conducted her to her chamber, which was near her own, and at the end of a long gallery that overlooked the hall; here they parted; but a servant remained, who offered to assist Madeline in undressing; an offer which she, never accustomed to such attendance, refused; and, feeling a restraint in her presence, dismissed her; yet scarcely had she done so, ere she felt an uneasy sensation, something like fear, stealing over her mind as she looked round her spacious and gloomy apartment; nor could she prevent herself from starting as the tapestry, which represented a number of grotesque and frightful figures, agitated by the wind that whistled through the crevices, every now and then swelled from the walls. She sat down near the door, wishing herself again in her own little chamber, and attentively listening for a passing step that she might desire the servant she had dismissed to be recalled; but all was profoundly still, and continued so; and at length she recollected herself, blushed for the weakness she had betrayed; and, recommending herself to the protection of heaven, retired to bed, where she soon forgot her cares and fears. She awoke in the morning with renovated spirits; and, impatient to gratify her curiosity by examining the contents of the chamber, instantly rose: the furniture was rich but old-fashioned; and as she looked over the great presses and curious inlaid cabinets, she thought indeed she must have not only a great fortune, but great vanity if she could ever fill them.

My route, Sior Francis—and don't be surprised when you hear it—my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade—cabinet-maker, weaver, mason—and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty? But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure—and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He assaults his dinner, bolts his food, then quarrels with his wife, beats his children without rhyme or reason simply because he's tired and irritated, and afterwards he clenches his fists and sleeps. Waking up for a moment he finds his wife at his side, couples with her, clenches his fists once more, and plunges back into sleep.... Where can he find time for God? But the man who is without work, children, and wife thinks about God, at first just out of curiosity, but later with anguish.

Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, ‘cabinet of curiosities’?” Nora wondered at the man’s ability to pile on non sequiturs. “Wasn’t it a kind of natural history collection?” “Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many

Wunderkammer or “wonder room”—what the English would call a cabinet of curiosities.

Wunderkammern, a “wonder chamber,” or a “cabinet of curiosities” in your house—a room filled with rare and remarkable objects that served as a kind of external display of your thirst for knowledge of the world.

Relic was our first novel, and the first to feature Agent Pendergast, and as such has no antecedents. Reliquary is the sequel to Relic. The Cabinet of Curiosities is our next Pendergast novel, and it stands completely on its own. Still Life with Crows is next. It is also a self-contained story (although people curious about Constance Greene will find a little more information here, as well as in The Cabinet of Curiosities). Brimstone is next, and it is the first novel in what we informally call the Diogenes trilogy. Although it is also self-contained, it does pick up some threads begun in The Cabinet of Curiosities. Dance of Death is the middle novel of the Diogenes trilogy. While it can be read as a stand-alone book, readers may wish to read Brimstone before Dance of Death. The Book of the Dead is the culminating novel in the Diogenes trilogy. For greatest enjoyment, the reader should read at least Dance of Death first. The Wheel of Darkness, which you presently

While Cabinets of Curiosities were intended to be microcosms of the world, and to symbolise a ruler's all-powerful control of his realm, Rudolf's came to mean much more than that. It become his refuge from personal and political turmoil, a private universe he could control.

Although she sits quietly, there’s a squelching, sickening fear inside, turning her limbs to water. What will she do? Where will she go? Will she die on this bench, unseen and unmourned? Battling with her fear is fury. At the hotel, for tossing her out on the street. At her mother, for somehow allowing it to happen. At the children, for frolicking in the waves without a care. How dare they? She knows the thought is irrational, but it comes anyway. How dare they be so happy? As

Good. Unusuals can't afford to be anarchists, Zeph. Look at me - I'm a dwarf and a Jew. You're a Negro and legless. Add 'anarchist' and you've got the Trifecta of F***ed. Don't do it.

Yes, here. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Just a typical few days at Magruder's," Rosaline says. "Plague, death, imminent doom." "Excellent." Zeph grins.

how I choose to handle myself as a writer is entirely my own choice. I can make my creativity into a killing field, or I can make it into a really interesting cabinet of curiosities. I can even make it into an act of prayer. My ultimate choice, then, is to always approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness.

talus

In the late 2nd century A.D., a senatorial decree allowed for the granting of a bonus of five hundred sestertii to a victorious gladiator if he was a free man, and of four hundred if he was a slave (Select Latin Inscriptions 5163.29ff.), the amount that a schoolteacher might make in a year (Juvenal Satires 7.242).

Magistrates often condemn criminals to be kept in prison or in chains. They ought not to do this, for such punishments are forbidden: prisons are for restraining people, not for punishing them (Justinian’s Digest 48.19.8.9).

Lucius Orbilius Pupillus [literally, “Student,” a fine cognomen for a famous teacher], who published a book titled On Stupidity, in which he complains about the injustices suffered by teachers because of parents’ negligence or interference.

Look at me—I’m a dwarf and a Jew. You’re a Negro and legless. Add ‘anarchist’ and you’ve got the Trifecta of Fucked.

we could rebuild the Brooklyn Bridge with the bodies of black men who didn’t do anything.

Look at me.” Rosalind speaks very quietly. “Look at the way I choose to live. Ask yourself just how tough a person has to be to live like this.

If you get him talking about opera? Suddenly he’s got more camp than Yellowstone!

There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?

But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.

I have chosen to believe that a desire to be creative was encoded into my DNA for reasons I will never know, and that creativity will not go away from me unless I forcibly kick it away, or poison it dead. Every molecule of my being has always pointed me toward this line of work—toward language, storytelling, research, narrative. If destiny didn’t want me to be a writer, I figure, then it shouldn’t have made me one. But it did make me one, and I’ve decided to meet that destiny with as much good cheer and as little drama as I can—because how I choose to handle myself as a writer is entirely my own choice. I can make my creativity into a killing field, or I can make it into a really interesting cabinet of curiosities. I can even make it into an act of prayer.

What is it the Arab sages call death?” Pendergast went on. “The destroyer of all earthly pleasures. And how true it is: old age, sickness, and at last death comes to us all. Some console themselves with religion, others through denial, others through philosophy or mere stoicism.

I’m afraid I don’t suffer petty bureaucrats gladly. A very bad habit, but one I find hard to break. Nevertheless, you will find, Dr. Kelly, that humiliation and blackmail, when used judiciously, can be marvelously effective.

The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid. When you give an Einstein two centuries to perfect his science, you give a thousand others two centuries to perfect their brutality.

In a world becoming ever more complex with each new geographic and scientific discovery, the ideal cabinet of curiosities constituted an attempt to produce an overall picture of this world, the cosmos. Within its limited space, the cabinet represented a microcosm, reproducing the general picture, the macrocosm, on a reduced scale. The early cabinets of curiosities thereby spotlighted areas on the fringes of the known world.

The aim was to bring together -- at least in representative form -- the most complete collection possible of all things knowable and worth knowing.

The arrangement of various objects in a room -- some laid out on tabletops -- gave the viewer the opportunity to relate individual objects to one another visually and to draw connections between them. A given natural specimen, a piece of coral for instance ... thereby acquired different meanings. ... What today seems the very heterogeneous organization of cabinets of curiosities was grounded in this network of meanings, and arose out of correlations with religion and alchemy as well as out of the classification of objects by their specific material properties.

When a collector or naturalist commissioned an artist to draw specimens of interest to him, ... the plant or animal in question underwent considerable abstraction and distillation on its way to becoming a scientific illustration. Just as a specimen was regarded as representative of its species, so its appearance was systematized. Individual traits not typical of its kind were minimized and the scientifically significant ones were accentuated. ... This pictorial abstraction may also be understood as one way of taming the multifariousness of nature.

As Lichtenberg said of angels," he wrote in one of his last letters, "so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God's name should we understand?

prolixity.

New York Public Library.

The whole city was on the verge of panic.

P.S. 1984,

P.S. 1984.

high school,

less

thirty-six dollars,

January 1881,

the city.

the New York Public Library.

TriBeCa.

It would have been better if they’d cashiered him.

And then, just as the second hand swept toward noon, he had the revelation. The Museum Archives. The Museum curator… It was so overwhelming, so blinding, that it temporarily drove all thoughts of corned beef from his head.

Not going to lunch before noon was a matter of discipline with him. As a police officer, he knew discipline was key. That was what it was all about. He couldn’t let the pressure get to him.

Ex Libris

Two guards. Twice the chance of being recognized, half the chance of pulling a fast one on them. He had to get rid of one.