“I have the impression that I've known hours of every colour, loves of every flavour, yearnings of every size. Throughout my life I lived to excess, and I was never enough for myself, not even in my dreams.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.”
Source: Sorcerer's Apprentice
“If you dive for it, you will find it. Who says there is no pearls in the ocean?”
Source: One Life: An Afghan Remembers
“One should always be suspicious of a woman who tells you that her past was burnt in the flames of a schoolhouse in Peshawar.”
Source: Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders
“A give-and-take situation was created between the two sides so that that slavery could continue to exist.”
Source: De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop
“Tobacco, pepper or cotton; it's all the harvest by gracious fingers of one good slave!”
“One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons.”
Source: De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop
“Do you know the city of Palmyra?'
'No.'
'Once it was a major city of the world. A place of temples to the sun and moon and of great archways curving against the desert sky. A place of trade, where all races lived as one. Then it fell as all civilisations can sem to fall. It was destroyed, its people were put to death.'
'That's terrible.'
'The destroyers were the Romans, those thought to be the great civilisers of the ancient world.”
Source: Island
“Zinah had not lost her touch, had she? She had a way with these girls. Amirah now ached to become more devout. Another win.”
Source: The Missing Activist
“But radical feminist or not, Alesha Parkhurst loved British freedoms as much as Karen Andersen.”
Source: The Missing Activist