The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale - Joseph Conrad
Through a strange pinging about through some books, styles and authors I happened to find myself reading Conrad's The Secret Agent a couple of months ago. Generally, I enjoyed it since it has a plot that moves along well and it doesn't ask too much of its reader while still being passably respectable in quality. Anyhow, there was one quote that popped out at me: "Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious." It's something a tossed off line in service of describing Verloc's discomfort and confusion with his wife Winnie who is described as "incurious" perhaps half a dozen times in the book. Sort of a twist on the Proverbs "Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue," which gets attributed (in variation) to Twain now and then. Regardless, the quote does ask the reader to question how much we m...