Chris

“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

“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

“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

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