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1 " And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop. "
― Robert Harris , Pompeii
2 " The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust. "
3 " People perish. Books are immortal. "
4 " Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere... - Pg. 82 "
5 " For them, it was just an ordinary miracle. "
6 " To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid. "
7 " What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason "
8 " But only a fool sails into combat with nature "
9 " Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions. "
10 " The natural impulse of men is to follow, he thought, and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate the rest. "
11 " Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. "
12 " ... Mother Nature is punishing us, ..., for our greed and selfishness. We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone. We dig her up and dump her in the sea. We sink mine shafts into her and drag out her entrails - and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finer. Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger?" - Pliny, Pg. 176 "
13 " Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82 "
14 " A nothing that said everything. "
15 " What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason? "
16 " Thus the thermal energy released during the A.D. 79 eruption would have been roughly 2 x 1018 joules—or about 100,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. "
17 " As if earthquakes aren’t as much a part of living in Campania as hot springs and summer droughts! "
18 " La cenere s'indurì, cadde altra pomice. L'interno dei cadaveri marcì e insieme a loro, con il passare dei secoli, marcì anche il ricordo dell'esistenza in quel punto di una città. Pompei divenne una città di cittadini vuoti dai contorni perfetti, stretti l'uno all'altro o isolati, con gli abiti volati via o sollevati sul capo, che tentano disperatamente di afferrare i loro oggetti più adorati senza riuscire a stringere nulla tra le mani: vuote entità sospese a mezz'aria al livello dei tetti. "
19 " [...] ma a Roma un uomo onesto era un uomo raro: cioè un cretino. "
20 " Con quale velocità, pensò l'ingegnere, la natura si riprende ciò che ha dovuto cedere: pioggia e gelo sbriciolano la muratura, le strade sono sepolte da strati verdi di erbaccia, gli acquedotti sono ostruiti dalla stessa acqua per portare la quale sono stati costruiti. Quella della civiltà è un'incessante guerra che l'uomo è destinato a perdere. "