Chris

“So many stories were told about him: that he had held important positions—grand dignitary of the sultan, hydraulic engineer to the diwan, or others like that”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“on the façade of the house the lighted candles opened eyes of gold within the window frames.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“The archaic mother—Tiamat, or the T. rex—is an unlikely role model. Even in all her power, she’s ugly: slimy, roaring, irrational, seemingly little more than a uterus with some anger management issues attached. (But enough about me!)”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Yes, each city has its invisible city, as Italo Calvino suggests in his great story of that name. Calvino’s story is itself cleverly nested within tellings of tellings, stories of stories, so that the text possesses multiple versions of itself. In what is to me the most memorable section, the narrator describes the impossible city of Eusapia, in which inhabitants of the living city are accompanied by ‘an identical copy of their city, underground’, a ‘Eusapia of the dead’ which can be accessed only by a confraternity of hooded brothers – though over time the symmetry between upper and lower cities becomes so acute that ‘in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey