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“Robin gazed at the curve of Babel against the moonlight, at the faint silver glow cast off by its many reinforcements. He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that had made possible its rarefied existence. ‘I want it to crumble.’
Victoire’s throat pulsed ‘I want it to burn.”

“You have pretoogjes,’ Professor De Vreese observed.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Pretoogjes.’ Professor De Vreese gestured at his face. ‘Fun eyes. A Dutch word. Twinkling eyes, shifting eyes. We use it to describe children who are up to no good.”

“It’s called yánghuò,’* said Robin. ‘That’s what she called the opium. Yáng means “foreign”, huò means “goods”. Yánghuò means “foreign goods”. That’s how they refer to everything here. Yáng people. Yáng guilds. Yánghuòre – an obsession with foreign goods, with opium. And that’s me. That’s coming from me. I’m yáng.”

“He knew when to play a lascar, a houseboy, a prince. He learned when to flatter and when to engage in self-deprecation. He could have written a thesis on white pride, on white curiosity. He knew how to make himself an object of fascination while neutralizing himself as a threat. He fine-tuned the greatest of all tricks, which was to swindle an Englishman into looking at him with respect.”

“But the Holy Word, it turned out, was both unpredictable and unforgiving on silver. There was a desk in the north wing of the eighth floor that no one dared approach because it still occasionally emitted smoke from an unseen source. There, it was rumoured, some foolish graduate fellow had attempted to translate on silver the name of God.”

the best thing you could do is going blind in to reading a book so you can really know how you feel about it...

cr : 3 books

“ولو خشيت الغرق فأنت غارق لا محالة»..”

“Ne craignons jamais les voleurs ni les meurtriers. Ce sont là les dangers du dehors, les petits dangers. Craignons-nous nous-mêmes. Les préjugés, voilà les voleurs ; les vices, voilà les meurtriers. Les grands dangers sont au dedans de nous. Qu'importe ce qui menace notre tête ou notre bourse ! Ne songeons qu'à ce qui menace notre âme.”

“Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.”