How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"They couldn't read. They were illiterate! [...] They couldn't read my letter." (1.3.184)
So many things set this book's events into motion. Dr. Philobosian has a letter of immunity, but the soldiers who come his house can't read it, so they kill his kids. With his family dead, he flees to America. There, he botches Cal's birth, and so on and so forth. How would things have been different if the Turkish soldiers has cracked a book every now and then?
Quote #5
Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees. (1.4.1)
This is a nicer way of saying that good things happen when you least expect them. Love. Happiness. Success. Winning Publisher's Clearing House…
Quote #6
[Desdemona] kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most devastating way possible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children. (2.4.60)
Wow—we're glad we don't have her as a grandmother. We're not too keen on paying for the sins of ancestors, but maybe that's something we all do anyway…