Ember Sappington’s Reviews > Memoirs of Hadrian > Status Update

“We talk much of the dreams of youth. Too often we forget its scheming. That too is a form of dream, and there is no less extravagant than the others.”

“A handsome face was my conqueror.”

“Life was to me a horse to whose motion one yields, but only after having trained the animal to the utmost.”

“For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men.”

“The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.”

I prepare my sustenance myself, not out of suspicion, as is surmised, but because I thus procure for myself the luxury of being alone.

I grant that the most perfect repose is almost necessarily a complement to love, that profound rest reflected in two bodies. But what interests me is the specific mystery of sleep partaken for itself alone, the inevitable plunge risked each night by the naked man, solitary and unarmed, into an ocean where everything changes, the colors, the densities, and even the rhythm of breathing, and where we meet the dead.

“The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basis of ours; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, those stain are broken, he comes into a collectors pleasure and being the soul seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by.”

“When each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem, when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then I see much more an invasion of the flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone.”

“To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth; it is to consume a sacrifice wherein we sustain ourselves at the ex-pense of things. I have never bitten into a chunk of army bread without marveling that it can transform itself into blood and warmth, and perhaps into courage.”