The Physick Book Of Deliverance Dane Quotes
"IT WOULD APPEAR THAT WE ARE NEARLY OUT OF TIME," ANNOUNCED Manning Chilton, one glittering eye fixed on the thin pocket watch chained to his vest.
"Thomas, you get nauseous over our tutorial meetings," Connie had reminded him gently.
"Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school."
"The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice."
"Most cases of witchcraft occurred sporadically. The average witch was a middle-aged woman who was isolated in the community, either economically or through lack of family, and so was lacking in social and political power."
"After much discussion and debate, we would like to congratulate you on the strongest doctoral qualifying examination that we have seen in recent memory."
"I am reasonably certain that our friend here has brought us a mandrake," she said.
"So, they’re among the most poisonous plants known to man," said Connie. "So poisonous, in fact, that legend had it that anyone who tried to dig one up himself would die on the spot."
"The temptation is to begin a discussion of witchcraft in New England with the Salem panic of 1692, in which nineteen townspeople were executed by hanging."
"But I see it as the last gasp of Calvinist religiosity. By the early eighteenth century, Salem had moved from being a predominantly religious community to being more diverse, more dependent on shipbuilding, fishing, and trade."
"I spend a lot of time at the landmarks commission office."
"I’m just working on the restoration of the cupola."
"The world would have seemed like a big, incomprehensible progression of random occurrences and acts of God."
"I can see that. But history’s not as different as you might think."
"People are people, after all, even Puritans."
"To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees and shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full."
"She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls."
"She pictured her mother, hair still long, graying, standing with the telephone pressed to her cheek in the kitchen of her Santa Fe house."
"Grace had complicated ideas about most things, actually."
"But even if the book is probated together with several other books, I might still be able to trace its movement within the collection."
"Of course a woman who produced much of her own food would think that the weather was an important matter for her journal."
"The world was a weird-looking place before we knew about atoms and DNA."
"Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real."
"She was trying to figure out what its component qualities were, not just to understand the world better but also so that they could try to control it."
"Connie reflected that if Janine did not walk through the front door within the next five minutes, the odds were better than even that she would stand up and break her barstool over the jukebox."
"Sometimes ya get some weahdos up from Salem."
"Everything on earth, they thought, could be described using these categories."
"Her fingers walked the metal item from one digit to another and, squinting, Connie flipped backward in her notebook."
"The sky overhead had a sun and moon in it together, and then the woman disappeared under a writhing coil of snakes, replicating and spreading out across the snow, coming toward her."
"The police are right, it’s just weird kids from Salem, Liz asserted."
"I believe that your fall was caused by a grand mal seizure."
"Names of God in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, all written around a request for God’s help."
"I have been trying to track down this particular almanac—at least I’m pretty sure it’s an almanac—that I have reason to believe was donated to the Social Library."
"We are profoundly influenced by the rhythms of the world around us."
"And what surrounds the writing? Crosshatchings and Xs."
"A widespread vernacular divination technique mentioned in several sources, and found to occur as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century, was the so-called ‘key and Bible.’"
"It’s hubris to assume that we always ought to be able to explain everything."
"The key and Bible answered my question, even though I didn’t know I was asking it!"
"But it’s not just in the words. Sam tried out the Latin note card, and it didn’t work."
"The cornerstone of the best practice of history is effort. It is work!"
"I had to devise a way to hasten your research, as my own meager encouragements were proving insufficient."
"The philosopher’s stone is not only real, but likely an ancient name for an arcane arrangement of carbon atoms, able to bring purity to any disordered molecular system in everything from physics to biochemistry."
"But here and now, in this kitchen, the pain still rocketing through her nerves insisted that what she was experiencing was true, it had just happened."
"They were of particular value in the New World, which only acquired the means to manufacture local scissors and shears rather late."
"It's like making music. There is the instrument. There is the ear. And there is the practice."
"Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
"As you know, I place no faith in innate talent, Miss Goodwin. One cannot go skipping about, expecting one's romantic inclinations to lead the way."
"I plan to reveal the formula at the Colonial Association, bringing history and science together at last."
"But by itself? By itself, it’s just marks on paper."