Anj

“Of all the billions of people in this world Raphael is the one I know best and love most. I understand much better now – better than Piranesi ever could – the magnificent thing she did in coming to find me, the magnitude of her courage. I know that she returns to the labyrinth often. Sometimes we go together; sometimes she goes alone. The quiet and the solitude attract her strongly. In them she hopes to find what she needs. It worries me. ‘Don’t disappear,’ I tell her sternly. ‘Do not disappear.’ She makes a rueful, amused face. ‘I won’t,’ she says. ‘We can’t keep rescuing each other,’ I say. ‘It’s ridiculous.’ She smiles. It is a smile with a little sadness in it. But she still wears the perfume – the first thing I ever knew of her – and it still makes me think of Sunlight and Happiness.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“the idea that the Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi