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  "title": "Flying Dutch",
  "slug": "flying-dutch",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch",
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  "author": {
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      "slug": "jane-was-a-child",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/jane-was-a-child",
      "text": "Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasn't on the news, it couldn't really have happened after all.",
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      "slug": "love-love-was",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/love-love-was",
      "text": "Love? Love was a concept with which he was no longer comfortable. At his age, it did not do to take anything too seriously, and the depressing thing about love was the seriousness which had to go with it, just as these days you couldn't seem to get jumbo sausage and chips in a pub without a salad being thrown in as well.",
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      "slug": "like-fish-accountants",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/like-fish-accountants",
      "text": "Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing.",
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      "page": 23,
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      "slug": "well-its-a-bit",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/well-its-a-bit",
      "text": "Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me.",
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      "slug": "an-over-excited-accountant",
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      "text": "An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms.",
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      "page": 188,
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      "slug": "if-he-had",
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      "text": "If he had any philosophy of life, it was that everything happens by accident, and that at any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance.",
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      "slug": "it-is-galling",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/it-is-galling",
      "text": "It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It's rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it's all been worthwhile.",
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      "slug": "it-was-basically",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/it-was-basically",
      "text": "“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this.\n\n“The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”",
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      "slug": "his-role-in-history",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/his-role-in-history",
      "text": "His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there's always a lot of it.",
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      "slug": "so-youve-never",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/tom-holt/flying-dutch/so-youve-never",
      "text": "“So you've never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?”\n\n“What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can't say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.”\n\nJane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?”\n\nVanderdecker considered. “I don't know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can't actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”",
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