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The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, "Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
“Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”
“...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success--on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”
“Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon”
“Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”
“Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.”
“Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”
“You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that”
“Exploration...no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward...”
“While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things—things that most of us would never dare—who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”
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Book Keywords:
anger, amazon, strength-and-courage, madness, rain, faithfulness, explorers