The Origin of Species Quotes

“He was starting to think that consciousness wasn’t some lighthouse of self-knowing but merely a little cave where you made up stories about yourself, whatever it took to hide the shit and the slime, the utter mollusk you were in your deepest nature. He wondered what was down there, under the shit, what kind of bedrock he might strike. Take”
― Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species

“He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.”
― Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species

“Everything had changed now. Gothenburg, Kiruna, had become just anecdotes he’d tell Ingrid instead of some sort of final judgment against him. He”
― Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species

“He fell into fitful sleep and had an awful vision of himself as he truly was, shriveled and hopeless and small. He understood suddenly that he would never transform like a chrysalis into the perfect person he’d always longed to be, confident, charming, at home in every situation, but would probably remain forever as crippled and half-formed as he was now, closed off in his little paranoias and depressions and fears. Citizen of the World. That was what Trudeau had had pinned to his dorm room door at Harvard. But Alex was not up to that standard.”
― Nino Ricci, The Origin of Species