Greg’s Reviews > A House in the Country > Status Update

Isn’t it characteristic of savages to declare their own impunity simply because they wield the power?

What would become of our civilization without your sweet tyrannies?

How can it be that these people who have everything in the world, who in due time will become the captains of the empire of hand-laminated gold and owners of mines and whole tribes, should suddenly turn anarchists and destroy their own things, jeopardizing, in short, their prospects for inheriting power?

The truth was, she had decided that as long as she had no legal right to the money, she had better find some illegally—legality, after all, being nothing but a convention created for the benefit of those privileged enough to invent it in the first place.

But (Adriano reminded himself, so as to keep his head) Balbina didn’t understand the concept of hubris which he knew threatened him.

Both of them wore the tender, almost nostalgic smiles of those who live at the edge of great tragedies but who can neither understand nor share them.