Edward Dolnick > Quotes

“The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“Mary Anning, sister of the above, Who died March the 9th, 1847, Aged 47 years.” The grave perches at the edge of the sea, nestled near the cliffs that Anning knew so well. Visitors leave flowers and seashells, and, sometimes, a toy dinosaur or two.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“So in theory someone might have shouted “Dinosaur!” many centuries before the 1800s. But that’s unlikely, because discovering is not merely finding something; discovering is finding and understanding that you’ve found something.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The men had two favorite modes of speech, wild exaggeration and ludicrous understatement. Ideally, both were delivered deadpan. Time and again, the accounts overflow with an offhand vitality that reminds us that we are listening to Mark Twain's contemporaries.”
― Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon

“In 2010, the Royal Society, the world’s best-known scientific organization, put together a list of the ten most influential women in the history of British science. Anning turns up there, along with such notables as Rosalind Franklin, of DNA fame.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Only one story—the story of the dinosaurs themselves—had a happy ending. Happy in comparison, at any rate. Dinosaurs will be famous forever, first of all, and, what is more important, they were granted an enviable finale. Dinosaurs reigned unchallenged for an unimaginable one hundred million years. Then, in a cataclysm that reverberated around the globe, with no warning, no foreboding, no lingering, they vanished.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The bottom line is stark. Ninety-nine percent of all the animal species that ever lived—not individuals but species—leave no trace whatever. The biologist Jerry Coyne once observed that paleontology is one of the few fields—theology is another—“ in which the students far outnumber the objects of study.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton,” one historian wrote, “the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“Darwin detonated his bombshell, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The basic idea was simple. There are not enough seats at the table.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“Even supremely able and ambitious men quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers. "When one ... compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet who had compiled an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“We know that we have got about 2500 ft. to fall yet . . . and if it comes all in the first hundred miles we shan’t be dreading rapids afterwards for if it should continue at this rate much more than a hundred miles we should have to go the rest of the way up hill which is not often the case with rivers.”
― Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon

“The shift from God as mathematician to God as artist opened a door. Science grew more inviting.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“By the early 1850s, scientists were in an exultant mood. Geologists and paleontologists could point to half a century of accomplishment. Starting from nowhere—the word geology did not even exist until 1795, and paleontology not until 1833—scientists had racked up triumph after triumph. They had discovered reams of fossils, they had resurrected creatures beyond counting, they had flung open the gates of time, they had fought down their own religious doubts and dispatched their fundamentalist rivals. The time had come to celebrate.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The upshot is that the huge majority of fossils—99 percent of all the fossils ever found—come from sea creatures like sharks and shellfish. But the other 1 percent includes many of the creatures we care about the most. Dinosaurs were the most conspicuous one-percenters. They lived on land, which means that we’ve lost nearly all evidence that they ever lived at all. Out of every eighty million Tyrannosaurus rexes, scientists calculate, only one was ever fossilized. (The total number of T. rexes in museums around the world is around three dozen.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“many puzzle pieces had been picked up, admired for their handsome appearance, and then put to one side because no one recognized that they had any special significance. (A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Especially riches pulled from the ground. Two-thirds of all American workers labored on farms, with sweat and muscle the only fuels. “There was no quittin’ time and no startin’ time,” a folk proverb declared. “It was all the time.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853

“if the painting is that bad, how did Giltaij’s predecessors get the story so wrong? And not only did they get it wrong, but they got it wrong time after time. Emmaus was only the first of six forged Vermeers that Van Meegeren sold between 1937 and 1943. He grew increasingly sloppy and careless through the years—why wouldn’t he, since even the crudest fraud brought him millions?—and each new painting was uglier than its predecessors. “They sold just the same,” Van Meegeren would later marvel, and they sold at once, and nearly every one brought in even more money than Emmaus had.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“In the summer before the trial he had been diagnosed with heart disease and hospitalized for a month. On November 26, just before his prison term was to begin, he was admitted to the hospital once again. On December 29 he suffered a heart attack. On December 30, never having served a day of his sentence, he died. He died a hero. Over the course of the year that passed between his confession and his trial, public opinion in Holland had swung completely in Van Meegeren’s favor. Once damned as a traitor, he became, in the words of the American journalist Irving Wallace, “the man who swindled Goering.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“At around the turn of the twentieth century, two powerful, capricious forces met and magnified each other. Together they propelled Vermeer into the most rarified ranks of celebrity. The first was a shift in taste—inspired in good measure by rapturous travelers’ tales, Americans declared all things Dutch hugely desirable. The frenzy was dubbed “Holland mania.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“most forgers in real life work backward—they start with materials, not with an artist, and then choose the artist to fit. Their motto is, “Let the paper choose the master.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“For obvious reasons, the rule of thumb is that the more expensive the painting, the more important its provenance. But Van Wijngaarden had proved that you could take the opposite route and succeed beautifully, provided you could find a buyer too eager or too sure of himself to bother with paperwork and background checks. Rather than spell out every detail in a fanciful pedigree, Van Wijngaarden outlined a fairy tale and let his eager-to-buy, eager-to-believe audience conjure up its own fantasy.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Worse still, a long list of Dutch painters all seemed to be named Vermeer or Van Der Meer or something nearly identical. In Haarlem, two landscape painters were both named Jan Van Der Meer. Which was the father and which the son? What about the Utrecht painter named Johannes Van Der Meer? Was he the same person as the Delft artist named Johannes Vermeer, who painted ladies reading letters? No one knew, and not many cared.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“He came up with a picture called Christ at Emmaus. “It is unique in the history of faking,” the art critic and historian John Russell observed, “in being quite unlike any known painting by its supposed creator.” Venturing so far from Vermeer’s familiar paintings had two advantages. First, it let Van Meegeren sidestep the hazards of the Uncanny Valley. The second was more personal. Van Meegeren was driven not merely by greed but by ambition and vanity. To fool the world with a “Vermeer” that was to a large extent a Van Meegeren would prove, he reasoned, that he truly was a genius on a par with the most admired figures of the past.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“In Van Meegeren’s day, and today as well, the experts like nothing better than to ridicule their rivals by showcasing their errors in judgment, preferably in a tone of mock bewilderment. “Gratuitous nastiness is part of the art historian’s weaponry,” observes Christopher Wright, himself a veteran of many duels at dawn.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“By now scholars have devoted well over a century to ferreting out even the tiniest scraps of verifiable fact about Johannes Vermeer’s life and career. What they have found would barely fill a folder. For art historians, this nearly blank record is a source of maddening frustration. For a con man, it was a priceless gift. Where nothing was known for sure, almost anything was plausible.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“For religious believers—and the nineteenth century was a devout age—everything to do with dinosaurs and the depths of time spurred anxiety and confusion. It seemed nearly impossible to reconcile these new notions with biblical teachings. How to make sense of eons of time when Genesis fit all of creation into a mere six days?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World