Sarah

“When people started dying in the village, the emptiness gave her a huge canvas to work with. She has always liked to sew. So last year, she started sewing the cloth people. She’s made more than a hundred of them. They are real people. People who died.”

The bells of the church rang, and a solitary woman in a black shawl left the church and crossed the piazza. Signora Fiore was still talking. “The people who died are ‘gli spariti.’” Izzy stopped, unsure how to translate this. “‘Gli spariti,’ they’re called,” she said. “The vanished.”

“The vanished?” Ethan asked. Izzy nodded. Signora Fiore was still talking. “Some of the cloth people aren’t people who died. Like Signora Fiore’s own children. They live in Milan. Her daughter is a doctor. Her son owns a furniture store. She has sewn them because she doesn’t know when she’ll see them again.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys

“The little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. WORDSWORTH: Tintern Abbey”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter in nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances toward a hot sphere of turbulence and unimaginable density, in such a way my body, which only a moment ago as I’d watched the cat might best have been described as a vapor, a dimly perceived cloud around my soul, began to coalesce.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“Consideration like an angel came And whipped the offending Adam out of her; Leaving her body as a paradise To envelop and contain celestial spirits. SHAKESPEARE: Henry V”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical