Book Quotes

Oedipus' celebrated cleverness is at the very core of the play. . . And yet it is Jocasta, long before Oedipus, who realized the truth of who they both are: wife and husband, mother and son. She is the cleverest person in the room and we barely notice it . . .

She lived the rest of her life in a farm town of nine hundred, teaching piano and slowly souring into a bitter caricature of herself who smoked herself into an early grave at the age of forty-one.

[W]hile it might take effort to open a box, it's much easier to knock a lid off or smash a top-heavy ceramic jar. And yet the linguistically doctored image of Pandora opening a box with malice aforethought is the one which has entered our culture.

I learned the DEA version of the Miranda warning. Instead of 'You have the right to remain silent,' one of my new colleagues spouted, 'I have two or three words of wisdom for you. you're going to get a lawyer who will soak you and tell you not to talk, 'cause he wants your money. Or, you can work with us, starting now, and we'll help you. It's your decision, pal. We can be your friends, or we can make your life more miserable than you could ever imagine.'

[T]here is an ethical difference - isn't there? - between ignoring a stranger who needs help, or money, or a kidney, and actively killing them. Neglect isn't the same as animus. But to the person on the receiving end of no help (no medicine, no food, no kidney), the death they face is awfully similar to the one they would face if you deliberately assassinated them.

I could feel Latorre beginning to withdraw. Fewer deals were offered. His conversations were becoming increasingly short and cold. Then the DEA office in New York seized seven hundred thousand dollars and fifty-four kilos of blow from a courier that worked for Latorre's client, further challenging our relationship. My gut told me that red flags about Baldasare were flying around in Latorre's mind.

How easily the Chinese vacillated between ally and enemy every hundred years depending on who America was mad at or what America wanted. When needed, they could stand in as white, or at least, white enough to slaughter other Asian men and women in America's wars, but with the snap of a finger, they were yellow again - the color of a disease, the color of a warning. Indistinguishable from the yellow men and women they'd slaughtered. Any temporary acceptance into whiteness revoked as quickly as it'd been granted. Because that was the thing: they were never white to begin with.

[M]usic is meant to be shared. It's communication. The music itself taking life through an instrument or a voice, then reaching into the hearts and bodies of other people, and coming back. I never feel so alive as when I'm playing for people, with them.

'You know what does get you tenure?' She shook her head solemnly. 'The Canon.' 'The canon?' Ingrid whispered. 'Xiao-Wen Chou.'

The model was Jane Morris, wife of the artist William, with whom Rossetti had been having what we can reasonably conclude was a thrilling affair. Critics asked themselves what William Morris might think of a work showing his wife in such an undeniably erotic light, pained by another man. Fewer people thought to ask how Jane Morris might have felt to see herself illustrating the description of Pandora in Hesiod's Theogony as 'kalon kakon' - a 'beautiful evil.'

Zeus may wish us ill . . . but that doesn't mean Pandora herself is evil, any more than the lightning which Zeus hurls at those of us who displease him is evil. Lightning is neutral, neither good nor bad, however much we fear it. Perhaps we can accept that Pandora is the same, unless we choose to see her otherwise.

Like most of the launderers I had met, Siabetto was highly educated.

She stood before the archivist, smiling widely, hoping Margaret Hong would smile back at her. They had never exchanged many words, but Ingrid liked to imagine they shared an unspoken intimacy since she spent significant time studying her instead of the archive materials.

And yet there is Pandora, at eye-height, in the Parthenon, [a] temple, and its decorative sculptures of epic battles and religious processions, built for the sole purpose of reflecting and aggrandizing Athenian identity. For all the harsh words about women which we find in the writings of Hesiod or the virtual non-existence required of them in the speech of Pericles (at least as told to us by the historian Thucydides), there is an argument to be made that women were not quite as invisible as we might have thought.

What was once a poem was now an ideological stance on language, war, life, and death! She was seduced by the modernist obsession with form over content, the abstract over the concrete. . .

She breathed into her daughters, me and Billie, the urgency of never settling, of dreaming a big dream and following it. She gave us her old-world manners and taught us the value of good looks and made us both promise to never, ever marry for comfort.

[In Aesop's version,] the jar is full of useful things. And again they fly away when the lid is taken off. But the guilty party is not Pandora. Rather it is a 'lichnos anthropos' - a 'curious or greedy man'. . . The fable doesn't give him a name. But it is certainly a man rather than a woman, and one who is curious rather than evil.