Magnus Flyte Quotes

They just didn't make them like that anymore. Nowadays she was lucky to get some mild flirtation from some leather-faced NRA lobbyist. Forget about doggy-style on an eighteenth-century canopied bed by a certified KGB agent who said things like beg for it my little Yankee poodle.

History should be studied but not worshipped.

Served her right, really, having sex in a supply closet of the Boston Hyatt. But George had smelled like oranges and leather and he had bent her over one of those carts housekeeping wheeled around with soaps and shower caps and dry-cleaning request forms. That had been fun, and afterward she had pocketed some shampoo and conditioner.

At Harvard, you could tell if a girl would sleep with you by her poster. Modigliani--si. Klimt--no.

Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace.

Prague. Praha. The name actually meant "threshold". Pollina had said the city was a portal between the life of the good and ... the other. A city of dark magic, Alessandro had called it.

The city was in a panic, though a panic in Italy means most people still stand around coffee bars drinking espresso and Prosecco.

The cold war was over, but all the little games persisted. It was a good thing those puppets in the Middle East had been too busy grubbing around in their deserts to play any serious role in international espionage ... She took a calming moment to visualize the entire Arab world as a giant parking lot. Lovely.

Indeed, a convent was a kind of early think tank for women, since it was the preferred choice of intellectuals wanting to escape marriage.

You cannot hear the birds for all the gossip.

Charlotte Yates didn't especially care for music. All that abstract mooning about. Words, that was what moved people. A good play was worth a thousand symphonies.

It wasn't enough to be alive. Everyone needed something to live for.
Or die for.

Isn't it funny that only twenty years ago, they were down there cowering in terror that we trigger-happy, decadent, capitalist Americans would go nuclear on them any minute? Little did they know our secret weapon was Starbucks.

Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here.

Mark Twain said that, outside of Vienna, all coffee was merely liquid poverty, Sarah commented.

Prayer. That was what people did when there was nothing else left to do.

Sometimes it was just better to blow shit up.

(You think you know suffering? What about life before dishwashers? Washing machines? Tampons? Vacuum cleaners? You have no idea. No idea!)

Eleanor was all apologies, but Sarah enjoyed seeing a bit more of the Czech countryside. You probably couldn't say that you had really seen a country if all you had seen was a city or two. You had to see where the food was grown, what the riverbanks looked like, and what the highway manners of the inhabitants were.

Sarah felt about great sex the way St. George felt about slaying dragons ...