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Book: Jewels: A Secret History
Quotes of Book: Jewels: A Secret History

Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonishing in its banality.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
The probable reason that nobody at Mikimoto wanted a writer to go to the pearl farms of Ago…was because something terrible was happening in that bay. Since the 1990s, pollution has been pouring into the water, partly as a result of careless husbandry but also from untreated sewage from all the hotels that bring people in to enjoy the 'unspoiled wilderness'. No wonder the Japanese farmers were pulling out their oysters after just nine months: any longer than that and they risked losing most of their stock to the effluent in the water-it was killing the akoya oysters… Similar things are happening in Lake Biwa… Thanks to the pollution in the area, production at Lake Biwa has now declined almost to the point of nonexistence.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently-as the Scottish pearl-fishers, too, had learned to their regret. These creatures are a barometer of how we are treating our planet. Sometimes in our greed to make them produce pretty things for our pleasure we forget that they deserve our respect.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
Once upon a time Apache land would have stretched farther than the horizon, through New Mexico almost to Texas, but as white men found gold, silver, turquoise, and copper beneath its surface they carved up the territory like children sneaking to the fridge and slicing off a chocolate cake bit by bit: hoping at first that the loss wouldn't be noticed but ultimately not really caring.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing. And when we believe it, perhaps it is true.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
…in Pliny's time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered-as many did until the seventeenth century when this 'fact' was still being quoted as a gemological curiosity-how anyone could have thought to experiment with such a thing … He did not realize that the story was probably a metaphor, perhaps with the same root as the Christian symbol of the Lamb of God. A diamond is the hardest substance; a sacrificed lamb or goat the most innocent. The only way to overcome harshness and brutality, the imagery suggests, is with love.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them-if we want to see it-there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation…and there is a company's profit curve.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: 'like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead, like the red lotus, like saffron, like the resin of certain trees, like the eyes of the Greek partridge or the Indian crane…and like the interior of the half-blown water lily.' With so many gorgeous descriptive possibilities it is curious that in English the two ancient names for rubies have come to sound incredibly ugly.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.
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Victoria Finlay _ Jewels: A Secret History
...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings."
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