Yair’s Reviews > The Island of the Day Before > Status Update

"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)

"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)

"What does it matter, finally, whether it is there or not? If nothing more, this will be the story of two men who believe they are there, not of two who are there; and if you would listen to stories—this is dogma among the more liberal—you must suspend disbelief."

Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 260)

"Was it not true that, having emerged from an unhealthy world, he had found true health? The wreck had granted him the supreme gift, exile, and a Lady whom no one could now take from him. . . ."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 226)

"THE AMARYLLIS SAILED from Holland and called briefly at London. There, one night, it furtively took something on board, while the sailors formed a cordon between the deck and the hold, so Roberto was unable to see what the new cargo was. Then the ship sailed due southwest."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 204)

"IT WAS—AT last a firm date—the evening of the 2nd of December, 1642."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 177)

"It was the evocation of the Islands of Solomon that brought Roberto a kind of revelation. Why, of course, the clocks! What were so many clocks doing on a ship headed for seas where morning and evening are defined by the course of the sun, and nothing else need be known?"

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 152)

"ON THE NIGHT of June 29th a great noise wakened the besieged, followed by a rolling of drums: the enemy had managed to explode the first mine beneath the walls, blowing up a lunette and burying twenty-five soldiers."

-Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (pg. 126)