“...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.” — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
Throughout Asia and Europe, pearls were traditionally believed to ease a range of conditions, including eye diseases, fever, insomnia, 'female complaints', dysentery, whooping cough,… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“Ezekiel looked into amber and saw God, but the Teutonic Knights saw something less noble: gold.” — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“…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… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share
“Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much,… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing.… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence,… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
“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… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can… — Victoria Finlay Copy Share Image
