Gerhard’s Reviews > The Years of Rice and Salt > Status Update

It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! It's staying in love that's the hard part.

“God is a mathematician. A very great and subtle mathematician. As our bodies are to the crude furnaces and stills of your compound, so God's mathematics is to our mathematics.”

“You see,” he said, “it was the force of the air, or rather the pull of the void, that kept the halves together so strongly.”
The khan got up to leave, and his retainers rose with him. It seemed he was almost falling asleep. “So?” he said. “I want to blow my enemies apart, not hold them together.”

“We'll be back someday,” he said to them. “Us, or people worse than us.”

'To his advisors, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.
The emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.'

KSR eerily prescient (this book from 2003) about America's new golden age of imperialism.

“Sanctuary,” Bistami said. “That's what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the Sufi ribat in Persia. It's a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.”

Humans were so sure of themselves, so sure they had the world figured out and were lords of it all. And with their monkey numbers and their arrows, so often they were right.

“They do love their numbers,” Kyu agreed. “The Three Pure Ones, the Four Emperors, the Nine Luminaries—”
“The Twenty-eight Constellations—”
“The Twelve Horary Branches, the Five Elders of the Five Regions . . .”
“The Fifty Star Spirits.”
“The Ten Unforgivable Sins.”
“The Six Bad Recipes.”

The Chinese! Bold had had no idea they owned such a great fleet as this one. It made sense, though. Their pagodas, their great wall; they liked to build big.

In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.