The Gold Bug Variations Quotes

The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure.

I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared.

Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

Every calendar page also contains the anniversaries of everything that has not yet happened.

People who still love words have to be forgiven everything.

The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

persisting in forcing the weekly news into a parody of sense.

Locked in mock violence with this laughing little girl, her fists flaying at his palms as she picks up the trick of bodily injury, he sees that the unique achievement of this species, the thing that recursive consciousness ultimately permits, is the pretense that one does not actually manifest a trait even when taking maximum advantage of it. Everything the hominid branch has achieved—every treatise, tower, or diatonic tune—came about from surviving two out of three falls, prettying up the results after the fact.