How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I have built my financial empire on the very principle of kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined. (14.4)
The narrator of In a network of lines that intersect explains how his fondness for mirrors and illusions has managed to make him a genius in the world of business. Like Marana, he has discovered that it's not enough to create a single lie that can be quickly proven wrong. You must create lies that lead to other lies, and mix in the occasional truth to make it harder to track the lies. (Sound familiar? It's kind of like reading this whole book). The importance is not to destroy the truth, but to hide it where it can't be found—or where it's so out of place that it seems like a lie. Sneaky.
Quote #8
"He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath." (15.55)
Ermes Marana, in his effort to inject falseness and untruth into everything he touches, approaches Silas Flannery to help him spread mystery and uncertainty through the world of books. For Marana, the ideal author is one who completely embraces the deception of writing, one who realizes that the author of a book is just a name slapped on a cover page, a fictional character who can be swapped for another at random. It's not exactly what you want to hear if you plan on becoming an author to prove how great you are.
Quote #9
"Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification" (15.138)
The term "apocryphal" has two potentially opposite meanings. According to Flannery, it originally referred to sacred or "secret" books of religious power, and later referred to books that were attributed to incorrect authors and incorrect historical periods. By saying that there is no certainty outside falsification, Flannery seems to be coming around to Marana's point of view in this scene.