Connie’s Reviews > Beginning Middle End: A Novel > Status Update

“I suppose all we are ever doing is transmuting and translating: mountain to rock, rock to sand, sand to glass, glass to light, light to eyes, eyes to see, see to imagine, imagine to remember.”

“Because fiction is where memory and imagination meet.
　What do you even mean, Ma?
　Just that imagination looks forward and memory backward, and where the two meet, that's fiction.
　That's absurd.
　Why?
　Because, if something looks forward and another thing looks backward, they don't ever see each other.”

“That moment is glass: a startlingly translucent, hard, and fragile moment of transition.”

“A boyfriend I had when I was in my early twenties used to say that the difference between porn and eroticism is only the amount of light. Maybe.”

“Perhaps there is one specific sentiment, a kind of longing or nostalgia, that can warp time strangely: I think, sometimes, I miss the present more than I miss the past. And perhaps that is a form of time travel.”

“It's strange to think that what was seemingly the destruction of a place by natural forces—an earthquake, a landslide—was in fact the reason for its eventual preservation, whatever destruction and preservation mean in the arches and warps of human history. For about six centuries, the mosaics in the villa remained in the dark, covered by mud and rocks, their colors protected from the sunlight.”

“But in the introduction to the Loeb edition of Hesiod's Theogony […] I read that Chaos, the divine entity, is best translated as Chasm and not Chaos, because, in Hesiod's time, "chaos" did not connote disarray, lack of order, and all those things it means for us today. Chaos was perhaps a gap, an opening.”