‘I knew an old Illianer woman, once,’ she said slowly. ‘When she was young, her mother arranged a marriage for her with a man she had never even met. They do that down in Illian, sometimes. She said she spent the first five years raging
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“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners.”
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“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
― On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
Abdul’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Abdul’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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