Status Updates From La isla del día de antes

"Perhaps conceiving Romances means living through our own characters, making them live in our world, and delivering ourselves and our creatures to the minds of those to come, even when we will no longer be able to say I. . . ."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 481)

"WE WILL REMEMBER, I hope—for Roberto has borrowed from the novelists of his century the habit of narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread—that from his first visit to the world of coral our hero brought back the stone double, which seemed to him a skull, perhaps Father Caspar’s."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 423)

"The Island beyond reach, Lilia lost, his every hope beaten, why should the invisible Orange Dove not be transformed into the golden medulla, the philosopher’s stone, the end of ends, volatile like everything passionately wanted? To aspire to something you will never have: is this not the acme of the most generous of desires?"

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before.

Florid and self indulgent. I just couldn't get through it.

"So Father Wanderdrossel had to find some different means that would allow them to reach the Island but would not endanger the health of Roberto’s soul."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 325)

'AS ROBERTO, INCREDULOUS, demanded to know what, and how useless, the various methods to find longitudes had been, Father Caspar replied that while all were erroneous when taken one by one, if taken together the various results could achieve a balance and compensate for the individual defects: “And this est mathematical”'

Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 281)