# Birds Without Wings ## Metadata * Author: [Louis de Bernières](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B005Y0N2FQ * ISBN: 1400079322 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005Y0N2FQ * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ) ## Highlights Much of what was done was simply in revenge for identical atrocities, but I tell you now that even if guilt were a coat of sable, and the ground were deep in snow, I would rather freeze than wear it. — location: [157](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=157) ^ref-63643 --- In March there are still rains and cold nights, quaggy patches of red and grey mud in the roadways, and the wind known as El Hossom whipping up the equinoctial gale that blows for eight long days. In the pastures the colossal Sivas Kangal mastiffs with their iron-spiked collars do nocturnal battle with subtle lynxes and desperate wolves, and the green sandpipers have not yet returned to the marshes and woods of the north. — location: [2057](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=2057) ^ref-40360 --- Every night he lay sleepless, tormented by the implacable songs of the nightingales, reaching out the arms of his imagination to the Circassian odalisque whose face and arms would light up his chambers like the moon. — location: [2079](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=2079) ^ref-7870 --- Stamos the Birdman, his nose red and streaming as usual, carried a cage in which he held a pair of exquisitely colourful bee-eaters. They were green, russet and yellow, with long grey beaks, breasts of Aegean blue, and eye-stripes and collars of black. He reckoned that from one of the great houses that lined the harbour at Smyrna he would be able to obtain a high price for them that would make it worth his while to spend this journey scratching in the barbarous undergrowth of the verges for insects that they could batter to death before eating. Dead insects, he had discovered, were of no great interest to the birds, and it made him smile to think of the rich people’s servants having to go out looking for live ones every day as long as the birds lived. — location: [2092](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=2092) ^ref-44933 --- IT IS SAID that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side and in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which, although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world’s great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come. — location: [2678](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=2678) ^ref-19939 --- When he arrived in Istanbul therefore, Rustem Bey was in a state of irritable disrepair. Both his eyes were red and stinging, the left much more than the other. His new boots bore small toothmarks, and his nose was itching on account of the birds. His new Stamboul frock coat was dusty and creased, his new crimson fez was impregnated with cigarette ash, his moustache felt like a rodent that had adhered to his upper lip and died, and there were saliva stains on his trousers where the ancient Kurd had dribbled on him, having fallen asleep in an upright position, jammed between a dejected soldier and a crook-backed Jewish tailor. Rustem Bey had become more and more strongly aware that the musty and stale smell that had been tormenting him for several hours was in fact emanating from himself. — location: [2710](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=2710) ^ref-47149 --- Extra backgammon boards were sent for from Telmessos. Each evening the meydan rattled to the sound of dice and counter, and cries either of despair or triumph could be heard until well after dark. Backgammon is a game in which the first half consists of skill, and the second half of luck, so it appeals both to the cunning and the reckless, but it is always skill that wins. — location: [7196](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005Y0N2FQ&location=7196) ^ref-31712 ---