Quotes About The Arcane

#1. They are conversation-openers in the arcane femine language of Shoe.

Claire Cross

#2. I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No

Catherynne M Valente

#3. The Girauds' child was looking more and more like a problem.
Luke pressed his lips into a thin line. When she'd leaned in the stagecoach blazing with fervor over what was in the arcane books, it had taken all his willpower not to throw a bolt of magic to stop her heart.

Ann Gimpel

#4. Unfortunately for a multitude of occultists, humor is a rare ingredient in their lives. In fact it is their very lack of humor that has impelled them into the arcane and esoteric.

Anton Szandor LaVey

#5. Some of us feel the need to experience life before bending to the will of an arcane society.

Nicki Elson

#6. One of them had a large wooden sign nailed to its door proclaiming, NO SYMPATHY! I wondered what non-arcane visitors might think of the warning.

Patrick Rothfuss

#7. The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.

Michael Dirda

#8. We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

Neil Gaiman

#9. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Gregory Maguire

#10. For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.

Charles Bass

#11. He turned and gave the Dark Elf a nasty look. "They can do that," he said, "mess with your head, using arcane mind control techniques. Well-known fact."
The Dark Elf sniggered. "I wish," he said. "Sadly, no. You're thinking of journalism, which is slightly different.

Tom Holt

#12. To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.

Warren Buffett

#13. So the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Pablo Neruda

#14. Doesn't Eva have warm and eager flesh?"

"Of course. But the sweet thrill wanes somewhat when eagerness is so easily elicited. The succulent bliss of the moment is lost." Johnny could've written a whole song around that one sentence, so I committed it to memory.

Linda Robertson

#15. Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.

Lee Smolin

#16. You've had your warning, Cabal. Now, prepare to face the terrible arcane wrath of Maleficarus! Somewhere, a sheep bleated and quite ruined the effect.

Jonathan L. Howard

#17. Looking back, I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn't the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life. The

John Jacob Kaag

#18. Maybe the Truth of the Meaning of Life, Ancient and Arcane Knowledge of the Great Unknowable Universe is handed down only to persons presenting with the correct brand-name footwear. If you turn up wearing Shoe City knock-offs, you don't get to pass Go and collect Infinite Enlightenment.

Tracy Engelbrecht

#19. Don't be fooled by the many books on complexity or by the many complex and arcane algorithms you find in this book or elsewhere. Although there are no textbooks on simplicity, simple systems work and complex don't.

Jim Gray

#20. Believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

Christopher Hitchens

#21. Alchemy should have no part in a Je'daii's experience. It is a dark force, arcane and dangerous. It has the power to upset balance. There are other ways.

Tim Lebbon

#22. The lingo used in the space is so arcane and out of date that investors have no context for the discussions. The failure to establish a clear, effective communication system has been the biggest sin private equity has committed.

Bob Rice

#23. I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

China Mieville

#24. Cole felt like he'd stumbled into some arcane Templar practise, his sense of ease disappearing the moment the cups were pulled from the shelf.

Danika Stone

#25. Still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest. Toby

Margaret Atwood

#26. The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

Carl Sagan

#27. Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities ... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.

Robert Genn

#28. Quite so, although our brothers and sisters in the Seventh Order do not refer to the Dark. They regard themselves as guardians and practitioners of dangerous and arcane knowledge, much of which defies such mundane concepts as names and categories.

Anthony Ryan

#29. The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation, the only one that is tenable, of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.

David Deutsch

#30. Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.

Elizabeth Wein

#31. True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

Isaac Asimov

#32. All you need to know about the light is in being in the dark.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#33. Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Stephen Jay Gould

#34. Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

Nancy Pearcey

#35. It was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

Donna Tartt

#36. He imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile.

Lev Grossman

#37. Lawyers are the new three-button, white-collar, cuff-shooting cowboys. They fulfill all the cowboy criteria. Workingmen with arcane skills. They can be both good and bad, sheriffs and gunslingers.

A.A. Gill

#38. We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating ... second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind.

Stephen Jay Gould

#39. There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.

Al Gore

#40. The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn't, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us.

Shereen El Feki

#41. I don't think kids or grown-ups should be so eager to punish "geek" enthusiasm with shaming, even if the enthusiasm is for arcane things.

David Anderegg