Tessina Albizzi Quotes

“And my arm, where Tessina had touched me... I raised it to my mouth, kissed the cloth of my sleeve. And there, jumping from the weave to my lips, a taste.
Saffron- of course: what else would she be? A flavor that takes the lives of ten thousand lovely flowers. As it had done all those years ago, the taste rose again on my tongue as a ravishing, barbarian palace of domes and spires. Tessina. There she was, all of her: salt, the crystals that grow on oyster shells that have dried out in the sun; violets; lemon leaves; nutmeg; myrrh.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite

“But she was as wiry as any boy, and it had caused quite an uproar when Tessina first flexed her arm and a little muscle popped up, hard as a walnut, while us boys could hardly produce anything.
But she never looked like a boy. A mass of curls, the color of August straw, made a halo around her head, tight and springy, as if a goldsmith had put them there. Her skin was pale like the flesh of hazelnuts, dusted with little freckles, except when she stayed too long in the summer sun and it burned. Like a peach, her arms were covered in fine golden down, which also clung, fainter than faint, to her upper lip.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite

“I had been rolling the cherry around in my mouth, letting it slip across my tongue. There was the flicker of salt from Tessina's fingers, and her own flavor: saffron, violets, the liquor of oysters.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite

“So Tessina had become a woman, with cornflower-blue eyes, brighter than Filippo's best paint; and thick, wavy hair that had darkened a little to the color of old amber or perhaps chestnut honey, shaved back in the fashionable way from her smooth forehead. She still had freckles, the tiny upward curve to the end of her nose, but her face had changed. It had become itself.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite

“Though we were still half a room apart, I felt her: the tiny, coppery hairs on her arm that rose to attention when she was cold or aroused; the beautiful landscape of gooseflesh that was shivering across her skin beneath her robe; the flowery, powdery scent of that skin, as complicated as music. The faint freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose: I was falling into them, as though they were the starry summer sky.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite