Crina Toth

“The eye: the window to the soul; the center of the face's beauty; the point where a person's identity is concentrated; but at the same time an optical instrument that requires constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liquid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing action.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. We watch the dawn light break over the acacia trees, the birds pecking at the morning, as though at a fruit. Further off we see the serenity of a river, and the trees embracing its banks. We see the cattle slowly grazing, a couple running, holding hands, children dancing around a football, the ball shining in the sun (another sun). We see the calm lakes where there are ducks swimming, rivers heavy with water where elephants quench their thirst. These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they’re so far away we can’t touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can’t be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them?”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons

“Luanda is full of people who seem completely lucid but suddenly burst out speaking impossible languages, or crying for no apparent reason, or laughing, or cursing. Some do all these things at once. Some are convinced that they’re dead. There are others who really are dead, but no one’s had the guts to tell them. Some think they can fly. Others believe this so strongly that they really can. It’s a fairground of lunatics, this city – out there in those ruined streets, in those clusters of musseque houses all around town, there are pathologies that haven’t even been recorded.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons

“Sometimes, she said, she could recognize a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the locals instinctively call ‘autumn’, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid grayness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It’s noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, Ângela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn’t be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she’d believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people’s imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a dramatic pose: ‘And Egypt? In Cairo? Have you ever been to Cairo?… To the pyramids of Giza?…’ She lifted her hands and declaimed: ‘The light, majestic, falls; so potent, so alive, that it seems to settle on everything like a sort of luminous mist.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons