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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b43f6da | The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite. | Simon Schama | ||
| 373a65a | Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns - Makka, or Mecca - in which those Himyarite emigrants had settled. It was precisely because Arabian monotheism (as distinct from the confusing three-in-one version preached by Christianity) had such a strongly Judaic colouring - was in effect Arab Judaism - that Muhammad, who had lived among Jews all his li.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 4e0e006 | birth.5 | Simon Schama | ||
| 94e519f | In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can't help letting the boy know how he feels, right away, at the top of the letter: 'Well-being and strength I send you but from the day you went on your way, my heart, it's not so good.' And then, the inevitable clincher, the three words Shelomam must have known were coming, even without Osea having to write them, the phrase all Jewis.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 715d477 | for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power. | Simon Schama | ||
| 8d30e0b | question, albeit speculative, won't go away. No scholar quarrels with the archaic antiquity of the earliest elements of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Sea and of Moses. A strong consensus exists that their form is consistent with other similar archaic 'song' literature from the late Bronze Age Near East of the twelfth century BCE. If that's correct, even though the Song of the Sea has much in common with the Phoenician epic of the storm .. | Simon Schama | ||
| 2cd5ef4 | The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: An Introduction | Simon Schama | ||
| 2a34d3c | Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense) dwellings for impoverished Jews, without any obligation, though the evangelical side of the money naturally hoped for the admission of Gospel Light along with the natural kind. The district which filled with the Orthodox became known as Mea Shearim which, were it known to be the work of ardently Chr.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 25cdf3e | she had reached in her reading of Scott's novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction | Simon Schama | ||
| 9a24f7f | Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return of light, lustily celebrated in Greece and Rome. Triumphal days in the Greek style - like the Day of Nicanor commemorating the defeat of that general - were added to the calendar. | Simon Schama | ||
| 70a37b8 | The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-fur shtreimel hat worn over the yarmulka, the long belted black coat and white stockings that merchants wore in St Petersburg. This is what they still wear in Jerusalem and elsewhere, imagined as distinctively Jewish dress, which frozen over th.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 7432725 | No, no, no, choose , More Marimondes thought. It wasn't that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyr, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful of the injunction to save life clearly enjoined in the Torah. | Simon Schama | ||
| 26b3cf7 | Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, | Robert Macfarlane | ||
| 222dfe3 | Since there was little or nothing in Jesus' own reported teachings which required the repudiation of the Torah, it was possible to be a Jewish Christian, and considerable numbers in the first generations after his death were just that, both inside Palestine and beyond. | Simon Schama | ||
| d5481cc | The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses' spoken legacy to the I.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 387c5b4 | To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure. | Simon Schama | ||
| 6866027 | A central fact, possibly central fact, about the Hebrew Bible is that it is not written at a moment of apogee, but over three centuries (eight to fifth) of trouble, That is what gives the Book its cumulative sobriety, its cautionary poetic, severity from the coarseness of triumphal self-congratulation found in imperial cultures. | Simon Schama | ||
| e28574a | Jesus was constitutively, not incidentally--a Jew; the Old and the New Testament were organically connected. Jewish history was the father of Christian history. | Simon Schama | ||
| 97e51e9 | God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words. | Simon Schama | ||
| 13fe6ee | joy, | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 7a44975 | Their trade was not life, but death. They have eaten the fruit of the tree they grew for others to eat. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| fc9e912 | And the priest will say, 'This is a matter of the Devil and not of God,' and I will reply, 'Did God not make the Devil? Is He not omniscient? How can I be blamed for what He knew would occur from the very commencement of time? | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 215a42a | If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken. | path-not-taken road-not-taken war | Louis de Bernières | |
| ceb1302 | the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius. If you're stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck. | stupidity | Louis de Bernières | |
| 9a1eb79 | It was said that there was a smile at the corners of his lips from the moment of his birth, and from early boyhood he was a specialist in in appropriate interjections. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| b57bbcf | You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,' quoted Kokolios, looking at Stamatis significantly. 'I don't like your omelette,' said Stamatis. 'It's made with bad eggs, it tastes foul, and it makes me shit.' (62) | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 43ca1c6 | We live in a perpetual daze. The snow has made everything unrecognisable so that we never know where we are. Is this the escarpment we were told to take? Is that a stream in that valley floor, somewhere six feet below the shimmering cloak of white? What mountain is that? Someone strip away the cloud, for the love of God, so that we can tell. Is this a road we are floundering upon, or a river? Don't worry, we'll know when we reach the source.. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 148d70c | He was like one of those saprophytic orchids that can create harmony and wonder even as it grows and blossoms on a pile of shit, in a place of skulls and bones. He let his rifle rust, and even los it once or twice, but he won battles armes with nothing but a mandolin. (195-196) | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 87d9c95 | The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth lies stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| b6f62e5 | One should not, after | Louis de Bernières | ||
| e88575f | Psipsina emerged from inside the tunic, and jumped up on the table in order to curl up inside the cap, which had been her favourite resting place ever since she discovered the joys of contortionism; she filled it and overflowed from it in such a tangle and jumble of whiskers, ears, tail and paws that it was impossible to tell which part of her was which, and she slept in it because it reminded her of gifts of salami and chicken skins. | humour pets | Louis de Bernières | |
| 0e47b43 | Pelagia put her hands on her hips, taking advantage of the superiority implicit in the fact that she was standing and he lying down. | witty women | Louis de Bernières | |
| a7c81b2 | she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable. | human-nature | Louis de Bernières | |
| 484c65f | a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit, | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 77c961e | It seems that age folds the heart in on itself. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 182bbbb | Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away | Louis de Bernières | ||
| e0a1334 | Symmetry is only a property of dead things. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 79cea27 | this spirit rebels against the prison that my body has become, and my spirit is like a chrysalis that is ready to burst its shell, and when the shell bursts, it longs to be reborn in paradise, | Louis de Bernières | ||
| eeec288 | Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations. We have a very flexible conception of normality. | Louis de Bernières | ||
| 966acfe | The world is bulging with desirable women, as you have no doubt noticed already, but there are some who have a special presence, as if the space they occupy has more intrinsic depth and reality than that of others. These ones are surreptitiously incandescent, they glow with an invisible light reminiscent of mountains, shortly after dawn, in a tropical land. When I encounter one of these, it is like being in a clearing in the Amazon when a j.. | women | Louis de Bernières | |
| b38e011 | Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system. | Walter Isaacson | ||
| de3bd02 | that the sodas in the office refrigerator be replaced by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made. "Reality Distortion" | Walter Isaacson | ||
| ed69b7e | But when investing money, keep, I beg of you, Hastings, strictly to the conservative. | Agatha Christie | ||
| 4a833c1 | They are so busy knocking that they do not notice that the door is open! | Agatha Christie |