Sophia

“Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.
There is the stall they passed earlier, piled high with tin pots and cedar shavings. There is the woman they saw, still making her decision, holding two pots in her hands, weighing them, and how can she still be there, how can she still be engaged in the same activity, in the choosing of a pot, when such a change, such a transformation has occurred in Agnes's life? Her very world has cloven in two and here is the same dog dozing in a doorway. Here is a young woman, tying up clothing into bundles, just as she was doing when they passed. Here is her neighbour...giving her a grave nod as he walks by. Can he not see, can he not read that life as she knows it is over, that he is gone?”
Hamnet, pp214-5”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?”
― Stanislaw Lem

“Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader