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The Master and Margarita by Mikhael Bulgakov

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

📖 240/412

Quotes from The Master and Margarita:

All quotes come from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation unless otherwise stated.

"And the guest turned his face towards the nocturnal luminary racing through a cloud." "(p. 134)

"Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once." (p. 138)

"Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth but the truth, but the eyes - never!" (p. 165)

"...but there's something not nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate everybody around them." (p. 205)

Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett

📖 146/448

Quotes from Breaking the Spell — just a small sampling so far of passages that are fascinating, challenging, or thought-provoking:

"For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book." (p. 15)

"Miracle-hunters must be scrupulous scientists or else they are wasting their time..." (p. 26)

"One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance." (p. 31)

"Religion seems to many people to be the source of many wonderful things, but others doubt this, for compelling reasons, and we shouldn’t just concede the point out of a misplaced respect for tradition. Perhaps this very respect is like the protective outer shell that often conceals deadly viruses from our immune system, a sort of camouflage that disengages much-needed criticism." (p. 45)

"The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the original book." (p. 347)

"Knowledge really is power, for good and for ill. Knowledge can have the power to disrupt ancient patterns of belief and action, the power to subvert authority, the power to change minds." (p. 48)

"Do you ever ask yourself: What if I’m wrong?" (p. 51)

"History gives us many examples of large crowds of deluded people egging one another on down the primrose path to perdition. How can you be so sure you’re not part of such a group? I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers." (p. 51) 😳

"You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better." (p. 56)

"African animals—have been known to get falling-down drunk eating fermenting fruit from marula trees, and there is evidence that elephants will travel great distances to arrive at the marula trees just when their fruits ripen." (p. 66)

Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger

📖 25/488

From Keeper of the Lost Cities:

“...Haven’t you heard of the theory of relativity?” She thought she had him stumped with that one, but he just laughed again.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Who came up with that?”

“Uh, Albert Einstein.”

“Huh. Never heard of him. But he was wrong.”

He’d never heard of Albert Einstein? The theory of relativity was dumb? (p. 23)...

.... (p. 24) “You look confused,” he observed.

“Well, it’s like you’re saying, ‘Hey, Sophie, take everything you’ve ever learned about anything and throw it away.’ ”

“Actually, that is what I’m saying.”