Fiendish Codex Quotes

I believe we should celebrate new possibilities of combining the printed codex with electronic technology ... The information ecology is getting richer, not thinner. ~ Robert Darnton

Something must be going on deep in his subconscious, he thought, some kind of redecoration, refurbishment, reupholstering that required a lot of downtime - some shadowy application running in the background, performing unknown operations, consuming huge chunks of psychic ram. ~ Lev Grossman

It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians. ~ Paracelsus

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form. ~ Alberto Manguel

Hofstadter shows how the political psychology of paranoid politics works: (1) posit, as Senator Joseph McCarthy did, "a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man"; (2) declare its infiltration of the government to be massive and pernicious; and (3) insist that time is running out, and without immediate action their takeover will be complete. Paranoid politics is thus a psychological disposition - projecting one's problem onto the fiendish machinations of others, so as both to uphold one's own purity and goodness and simultaneously to identify the source of the problem. As with many projects that rely on psychological displacement, the groups often produce the very thing they most fear; they become the enemy they are seeking to destroy: ~ Michael S. Kimmel

My first album will be titled One Foot in Hell Already. ~ Cassandra Clare

It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is. ~ Terence McKenna

The Aleppo Codex is not only the oldest complete codex of the Tiberian Bible text known to us, but it is altogether the earliest complete codex of that Masoretic subsystem which had been perfected by Ben-Ashers. ~ Goshen-Gottstein

NYC Institute has one. I'll show you sometime if you want.
It's a date.
It is maybe the least romantic spot in the Institute, by the way.
You'll make up for that, I'm sure.
(Jeez, get a locked room on unsanctified ground, you two.) ~ Cassandra Clare

This was one of the unfortunate consequences of exaggerating the enemy's evil. You were obligated to exaggerate your own virtues as well. To counter the enemy's fiendish subversion, you wielded a blunt instrument of righteousness. And then you got a congressional committee of yahoos with subpoena power and God on their side...If only, Axel thought. If only they weren't so god damned dumb. ~ Ward Just

The camels had strayed far in search of scarce grass. When collected, they displayed a fiendish ingenuity in throwing their loads and tangling themselves up in every possible strap. ~ Rosita Forbes

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. ~ Herman Melville

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend 'the One, the All'. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites. ~ C.G. Jung

If Enron and Walmart got drunk in Vegas and had an evil corporate love child, Fiendish would be their rebellious teenage son." ~Kate ~ Cathy Yardley

Twas now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead,
And many a mischievous, enfranchised sprite
Had long since burst his bonds of stone or lead,
And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight,
To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed,
Sleeping, perhaps serenely as a porpoise,
Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus. ~ Thomas Ingoldsby

I trudged home by myself, worrying about the trestle. What was I supposed to do there? If Andrew had dreamed it up, it was sure to be terrible. Maybe I'd have to lie down between the rails and let the train run over me. Boys did that in stories, but I wasn't sure it worked in real life. It seemed to me you'd be gouged to death by things hanging from the bottoms of boxcars.
I thought a little longer. Maybe it had something to do with explosives. Andrew had blown up an outhouse once--he might want to dynamite a whole train.
I kicked a stone so hard I almost broke my toe. There was no way of guessing what went on in Andrew's fiendish mind. ~ Mary Downing Hahn

Dream Song 55
Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.
The architecture is far from reassuring.
I feel uneasy.
A pity, - the interview began so well:
I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away
and sloshed out a martini
strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters
God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,
John's energy,
anti-matter matter. I felt fine.
Then a change came backward. A chill fell.
Talk slackened,
died, and began to give me sideways looks.
'Chirst,' I thought 'what now?' and would have askt for another
but didn't dare.
I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,
some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:
'We betrayed me. ~ John Berryman

Open eyes are of little use when the mind behind them is closed. ~ Jim Butcher

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. ~ Margaret Atwood

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

WENT ON a long journey by telephone last week. It started with a message in my office on that fiendish modern invention, second in its monstrousness only to the television, the answerphone. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

And just as he had earlier, during their lunch hour, insinuated the problem of innocence to the formalists - which had incensed them and boosted their immaturity a hundredfold - he was now making an issue of my modern legs. And there I was, listening and lapping it all up - his linking the calves of my legs with those of the new generation - and coming to feel the cruelty of youth toward old calves! And there was also a kind of leg camaraderie with the schoolgirl, plus a clandestine, voluptuous collusion of legs, plus leg patriotism, plus the impudence of young legs, plus leg poetry, plus young-blooded pride in the calf of the leg, and a cult of the calf of the leg. Oh, what a fiendish body part! ~ Witold Gombrowicz

Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible. ~ Tom Bissell

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story. ~ Alice Notley

So the librarians at UCLA worked very hard to find another copy of Villacorta's rendition of the Dresden Codex, and lent it to me. ~ Richard Feynman

He studied the warehouse door. "I wouldn't put it past Lorcan to return the favor you dealt him tonight. He forgets and forgives even less easily than you do. Especially when someone threatens to cut off his manhood." "At least I said it would be a big mistake," she said with a fiendish grin. "I was tempted to say 'little.'" Rowan laughed, his eyes dancing. "Then you definitely would have been dead. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Very little of what he learned of people's actions began or ended with either the noble ideals or the fiendish wickedness he had been taught lay behind all great struggles. There was something comforting in this. ~ David Anthony Durham

I am quite scandalous, you see. I come packaged with unpredictable moments, brutal honesty, calamitous outbursts, the ghastly need for love, a fiendish lack of filter, the horrific need to question everything, nauseating affection, offensive kindness, indecent spirituality, obscene beauty, monstrous creativity, barbaric embellishments, contemptuous passion, sinful childhood traumas, unscrupulous hobbies, vexatious caring, abominable sensitivity, reprehensible humor, hideous sarcasm, displeasing feelings, unpalatable confidence, offensive compassion, villainous inspiration and a devilish wit. I am quite grotesque in my imperfectness and I am not ashamed to admit it. ~ Shannon L. Alder

The Pakistani film International Gorillay (International guerillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes - of the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis, or terrorists - who vowed to find and kill an author called "Salman Rushdie" . The quest for "Rushdie" formed the main action of the film and "his" death was the film's version of happy ending.

"Rushdie" himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli Army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim "leader" Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. "Rushdie" was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari suits - vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits - and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned [sic] with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult ~ Salman Rushdie