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“Sasha forged through the long, senseless combinations of letters, and her hair stood on end. She imagined that somebody was repeating those sounds after her in a dark room with mirrors instead of walls, and each word, after reflecting over and over in the mirrors, finally gained meaning, but by then Sasha had moved two sections ahead, and the meaning flew away from her, like smoke from a fast-moving locomotive ...”
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“As if she were a painter who had just emerged from an abstract phase, now, without becoming figurative, she had entered a new realism. In this realism each thing at the market had its own importance, connected to a whole — but what was the whole? For as long as she didn't know, she turned her attention to objects and shapes, as if whatever existed were part of an exhibition of painting and sculpture.”
― An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
― An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
“Palamedes: I loved you. I love you still. I would have worked out how to love you better over time.
Voice: It would have been very beautiful. Camilla would have had to cook. But I didn't just want beautiful ... I wanted it to last, and I wanted to wait, and I knew I couldn't have either. It's not that you were young and foolish, you know? It's just that you were young ... and I didn't want to steal any more youth from you. It made me feel rotten.
Palamedes: This again? From you and her both? That merely by loving you, I added to your torments?
Voice: (Encouragingly) Yes, and also my agonies.”
― The Unwanted Guest
Voice: It would have been very beautiful. Camilla would have had to cook. But I didn't just want beautiful ... I wanted it to last, and I wanted to wait, and I knew I couldn't have either. It's not that you were young and foolish, you know? It's just that you were young ... and I didn't want to steal any more youth from you. It made me feel rotten.
Palamedes: This again? From you and her both? That merely by loving you, I added to your torments?
Voice: (Encouragingly) Yes, and also my agonies.”
― The Unwanted Guest
“It is my mood that chooses the words for me. I have a mood. There is a lot you can do with such a thing. It can select words from the whole lexical palette, it can call language a palette, it can give things colors, even when they have no colors. I talk to no one, but my world acquires more and more details, I pluck words from a world with many voices, from a mood that lends color, that rubs off. But lending color to things takes up space. The palette overflows with hues. Too many words pour in, the day becomes heavier, slower, comes to a halt.”
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“The silence of the dusk. She looked at Ulisses, and he was looking into the distance with half-closed eyes. She looked at him. And at that hour a luminosity was coming off him. Then Lori realized that the brilliance was the sun's flashing before definitively dying. She looked at the little tables with parasols arranged around the pool: they seemed to hover in the homogeneity of the cosmos. Everything was infinite, nothing had a beginning or an end: that was the cosmic eternity. Then in an instant the vision of reality was coming undone, it had only been a split second, the homogeneity was disappearing and her gaze was getting lost in a multiplicity of still-surprising tonalities: after the sharp and instantaneous vision something had followed that was more recognizable on earth.”
― An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
― An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
Weird Fiction
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