A few years ago I saw this quote online, noticing that it appeared in what I assumed was a chapter heading I was curious to see the rest of the book. I did not find the rest of the book that year. A cursory google will quickly pull up multiple people attributing it to someone named "Urtiqa Nabi" with some slight variations on spelling. Googling Urtiqa Nabi only yields a couple social media profiles and some more images of the same quote.

At this point I thought ok well its not a particularly english name maybe I'm mis-spelling it, maybe the book is a not particularly well known translation. I went to my local library and asked the librarian for help. They were able to use some of their own search tools to attempt a couple different pattern matches without any results, and I decided to let my search sit.

Recently I was seized by my curiosity again, with the hope that maybe it would turn out to be a fun sci-fi novel I could dive into or something. I did some more googling, reaching the same dead ends. However, by pure dumb luck I happened to click through to duck duck go's related images and found one attributed to a different name: JH Hard. As luck would have it, JH Hard does have a book out (War, Over Easy). But if we look inside, none of the headings in the table of contents mention anything about the sea. But hey if we go to the start of part 1 there's our quote! A year and change later we've got our source.

Now the reason I'm making this post is because of the wild goose chase I had to go down to find the book. Why? because almost no-one that posted a copy of the quote provided an attribution, and those that did mostly repeated one person's lie. Who originated the lie I don't know.

But the important thing to note is how easy it is to take at first glance what comes up in a quick search and run with it if its not something crucial to whatever it is your doing. If I'm trying to learn how to cook a dish I will find out pretty quickly if I've been lied to. But something like a quote source is very easy to lie about and no-ones going to check it unless they happen to really care about finding the source for some reason.

The moral of the story I suppose, is to have an updated idea of which things you believe are likely to be based on misinformation.