Tommaso Querini

“Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them.


What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways.


It's the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stuffed with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It's the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there's no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros.


Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like gray shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting.


But on one bag there's blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child's idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“But intimate time was not just lived and lost, it was converted into the story Chloe and I told ourselves about ourselves, the self-referential narrative of our love. With its roots in the epic tradition, love is necessarily tied to the tale [to speak of love always involves narrative], and more particularly, to adventure, structured by clear beginnings, endings, goals, reversals and triumphs.
[..] However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement, the language of intimacy they helped create was a reminder that [..] Chloe and I had created something of a world together.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Nor is this uncommon, as Mervyn will tell you if you ask him. He has seen all of it before many times, including the curious pull that a corpse exerts, drawing people towards it. By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permenent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reiminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.
But in the mean time there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it [..] Fortunately she isn't heavy, the sickness hollowed her out, and it's easy to get her down the stairs and around the challenging angle at the bottom and along the passage to the kitchen.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise