Chris

“on the façade of the house the lighted candles opened eyes of gold within the window frames.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees: A Masterpiece of Literary Fiction about a Nobleman Who Lived His Entire Life in the Trees

“Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux?”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

“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

“She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer.”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind