“She feared that she’d missed something, because there were so many parallels with her own story, and she could not help but see in her head the small memories her mind would offer as tantalizing, but—in the end unsatisfying, glimpses of what may have occurred.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn’t. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“They studied the way the world
changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“But she insists the family hadn’t a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?
I really have become quite the Dante scholar: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“Serafina may think I’m a crazy person, but I’m not. She has her scars, too—and not only the ones I saw when she turned her head and her hair fell aside. We are both living out our lives in a Purgatorio. The difference? I arrived from the Paradiso, once young and married and so in love. But Serafina, she who was born alone in a fever dream of fire? She whose very skin is a tapestry of loss? Serafina, of course, arrived from the Inferno.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park.
And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman’s family.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would turn from sod to stone, and it would seem as if they were walking inside a crag in a cliff. The sky would be reduced to a thin swath of blue, broken in parts by the branches of the trees that grew above them along the sides of this ancient channel.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“The Beatrice that obsessed Dante was a Florentine named Bice di Folco Portinari. Envision this moment (and, in all fairness, I am envisioning it the way Henry Holiday did in his exquisite nineteenth-century painting): Bice is walking beside the Arno River, dressed in white, the fabric clinging to her legs and outlining her slender thighs, and there is Dante. He meets her at the corner of one of the bridges that span
the river. His left hand, at first glimpse, is moving casually toward his hip; it is only on a more careful study that one realizes his hand is actually going up to his heart. Meanwhile, his right hand is resting on the bridge’s waist-high stone balustrade, as if Bico’s beauty is such that he needs to steady himself when he beholds her.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“So you’re positive the killer is a man.”
“Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don’t cut out other women’s hearts.”
“We can.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“Seriously,” the banker went on, “what do you investigate? I have a feeling you do more than find stray kittens and bring home lost babies.”
“Murder.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat.”
“You’re selling yourself short.”
“I’ve just sold myself for rat meat,” she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
“During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Light in the Ruins
Chris Bohjalian
Born place: in White Plains, New York, The United States
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“To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife,” and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset’s first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. “If you live on the edge of the circle,” he explained in a documentary film, “that is the present moment. What’s inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What’s outside has yet to be experienced. The knife’s edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick,” says Davidson, “is to live on the edge.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“But William Dilworth English, M.D., was not thinking of the immediate punishment of his son; that was something which could be decided upon. He was not thinking of the glory of having a son who hopped freight trains. The thing that put him in the deep mood and gave him the heavy look that Julian saw on his face was that 'chip off the old block' refrain of Butch Doerflinger’s. William Dilworth English was thinking of his own life, the scrupulous, notebook honesty; the penny-watching, bill-paying, self-sacrificing honesty that had been his religion after his own father’s suicide. And that was his reward: a son who turned out to be like his grandfather, a thief.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“Explosion without an objective,” declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its purest form.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day
“Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn't matter. What's important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren't a problem yet, or they'd already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how a slave might become a friend to his master.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Jesus' Son
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Bradbury Stories: 10...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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