The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

I had already learned that no one wanted to hear what loss was really like.

“Yes. Exactly. Was your fate already written? Was it predestined? Or, could you alter its course?” “And, did you have the free will to do so?”

The ancient Romans were so afraid of the power of fate that they worshiped the goddess Fortuna.

The way you spend your time with just one work; you look lovingly, slowly. You are more than a scholar.”

“Who’s to say what the future holds?”

a little in love with him right away.

But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.

There’s so much space to imagine how a story might unfold when you don’t know anything about the setting.”

Some of them are incredibly beautiful and look edible. They aren’t.”

Academia did away with all that.

The way aristocrats and popes had believed that their painted ceilings—known today as celestial vaults, decorated with constellations and signs of the zodiac—could have as much impact on their fates as the stars themselves.

The idea that humans might be able to tell the future by watching planets migrate across the night sky had captured the imaginations of scholars and mystics for centuries.