“As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads. Nowadays, few people realized that the four-year schedule of modern Olympic Games still followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last moment—its five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to better reflect the games’ spirit of inclusion and harmony.”
― The Da Vinci Code
― The Da Vinci Code
“Most tourists mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city’s famous red roofing tiles—or tuiles.”
― The Da Vinci Code
― The Da Vinci Code
“Well done. Amon is indeed represented as a man with a ram’s head, and his promiscuity and curved horns are related to our modern sexual slang “horny”.’ ‘No shit!’ ‘No shit,’ Langdon said. ‘And do you know who Amon’s counterpart was? The Egyptian goddess of fertility?”
― The Da Vinci Code
― The Da Vinci Code
“The blind see what they want to see.”
― The Da Vinci Code
― The Da Vinci Code
“Mitterrand was a bold man,” Langdon replied, splitting the difference. The late French president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from a “Pharaoh complex.” Singlehandedly responsible for filling Paris with Egyptian obelisks, art, and artifacts, François Mitterrand had an affinity for Egyptian culture that was so all-consuming that the French still referred to him as the Sphinx.”
― The Da Vinci Code
― The Da Vinci Code
Matt’s 2024 Year in Books
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