Chris > Chris's Quotes

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
― Martin Heidegger

“The archaic mother—Tiamat, or the T. rex—is an unlikely role model. Even in all her power, she’s ugly: slimy, roaring, irrational, seemingly little more than a uterus with some anger management issues attached. (But enough about me!)”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“There was nothing that Clara disliked so much as what was tedious; at such times her intellectual sleepiness was not to be overcome; it was betrayed both in her glances and in her words.”
― Italo Calvino, Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

“on the façade of the house the lighted candles opened eyes of gold within the window frames.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“So many stories were told about him: that he had held important positions—grand dignitary of the sultan, hydraulic engineer to the diwan, or others like that”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Yes, each city has its invisible city, as Italo Calvino suggests in his great story of that name. Calvino’s story is itself cleverly nested within tellings of tellings, stories of stories, so that the text possesses multiple versions of itself. In what is to me the most memorable section, the narrator describes the impossible city of Eusapia, in which inhabitants of the living city are accompanied by ‘an identical copy of their city, underground’, a ‘Eusapia of the dead’ which can be accessed only by a confraternity of hooded brothers – though over time the symmetry between upper and lower cities becomes so acute that ‘in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer.”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

“Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux?”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

“the end of summer city: the shimmer of heat, the drip from window units overhead, the chorus of ice cream trucks, office buildings leaking air-conditioning onto the humid sidewalks where fat tourists were wandering dumbstruck.”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind