Status Updates From A Ilha do Dia Anterior

"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.