David Liss Quotes

I lived in Atlanta for a couple of years while getting my masters at Georgia State. I thought I hated it at the time, but I've been back a couple of times since, and there's no place I've lived to which returning is so much like visiting a place I only remember from my dreams.

Gabriela was in prison for Judaizing, but she recited the prayers of her tormentors. She had not even the comfort of the religion for which she was punished.

In 1985 I'd never seen a mullet before, had no idea what a mullet was, what it was called, or why someone might choose to endure such a thing except for the simple pleasure that comes from having two haircuts on one head. All I knew was that it looked monumentally stupid.

You are but a hard turd in the ass of my journey.

I knew there was no point in debating a man such as this. The world bent and contorted itself to fit his understanding, not the other way around. I could not make him see reason, could not make him regret his actions. It would be a mistake to try.

I did not tremble to lose what men called beauty, but I feared the loss of my spirit and humor and love of living, the things I believed made my soul human and vibrant.

I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen of the bench, but it is no secret that our system of justice, praised throughout Europe for its severity and its swiftness, is a terrible and fearful thing, and no man, guilty or innocent, wishes to stand before it.

over the last decade I had little

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.

There will always be a storm. You may be rained on or cause the rain yourself. I much prefer the latter.

I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.

Believe you have struck upon the problems of conspiracies. There are men who wish to keep you from uncovering the truth about this particular matter, but there are others who are only privately villainous and have their own little truths to hide. When you confront a conspiracy it becomes monstrous hard to distinguish between wretched villainy and ordinary, common lies.

I once spent a spent a summer selling encyclopedias door to door.

What are we playing for? This needs to be worth my while."
"Honour?" Steve suggested. "Let me know if your universal translator got that one. I know it may be a tough concept for your species.

I don't generally listen to music while working, but sometimes music can help me get past minor writer's block.

I fear we face a new kind of man along with this new kind of affluence. When lands meant wealth, men could perhaps have enough. Too much land was difficult to govern. But with paper money, more is simply more. In France, you know, where they suffer from their own financial mania, they have a word - the millionaire - to denote men whose wealth is measured in the millions. Millions. It is inconceivable, but there are more than a few men who hold this title.

Needless to say, it was inconceivable that I would be welome in, let alone invited to, their home. It was as well, then, that I did not limit myself only to those places where people might wish me to be.

Proximity, I have learned, is often as effective as violence.

The less said about the things Steve ate for breakfast the better, though I will mention that the food did not want to be eaten, and Steve had to remove the singers before he could pop the things in his mouth.

The harm is in whom this system makes powerful. If value is no longer vested in gold, but in the promise of gold, then the men who make the promises hold ultimate power. If money and gold are one and the same, then gold defines value, but if money and paper are the same, then value is based upon nothing at all.

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan.

Sometimes you make your mistakes with your eyes wide open.

Lucy absently thanked him and at once began to consider which among her gowns would be best suited for a midnight adventure to a gothic castle.

Magic has been around forever, and it's also been in trouble forever. I'm not suggesting that there was ever a time when the practice of magic was celebrated by those in power. Actually, such practices were routinely demonized by monarchs and organized religions precisely because magic is inherently democratic.

I am saying that while popular culture usually portrays practitioners of magic as separate from ordinary people, often biologically different, many people have habits or customs or superstitions that show magic was once a whole lot more democratic.

Not anticipating I'd be on trial for my life, my mother hadn't bothered to pack a suit for me. She was, by nature, an optimist.

I do, in fact, have a book club. I meet with a couple of guys once a month of a lunchtime discussion of some interesting text, usually, but not always, philosophical.

I do feel like I'm in this lucky position where I can write something and people will read it, and I feel like I should say something that's probably worth saying ... I feel like it's something worth saying, and one more person saying it is better.

At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity?

I imagine it is because you can lead him to a story for his newspaper, and if it is for his paper, it must be something to make Hamilton look poorly.

We are all driven by our passions, and our task is to know when to submit to them and when to resist.

You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle.

Lucy had no wish to entertain that gentleman. None at all. It was not that Lucy did not wish to marry Mr. Olson, for she had no doubt that marrying him was the most practical thing to do. Nevertheless, she would very much rather avoid the necessity of making conversation with him.

If we do nothing ... and turn our backs now, in future generations, when rank corruption masquerades as libery, it will be upon our shoulders. True patriots will then ask why we who were there to witness our nation at the crossroads did nothing.

What had passed between them had been real and true and lived. Not like the silly infatuation she had felt for [him] when she was 16, or the foolish attraction she'd felt. Theirs had been a true love. Forged and built and earned.

I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that's what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry?