“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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“La verdad es como una manta que nos deja los pies fríos. Ya puede uno tirar de ella hacia sí en todos los sentidos, que nunca nos cubrirá del todo. Sacudidla, tirad de ella, mas nunca será suficiente. Desde el día en que se viene al mundo, llorando, a aquel a quien se le entrega, agonizante, no puede hacer más que cubrirse con ella la cabeza y gemir, llorar o aullar.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, quote from Dead Poets Society
“A man ought not be afraid to say he didn’t know. Nor a woman.”
― Anne McCaffrey, quote from The Dragonriders of Pern
“My journey in this relationship hasn’t been as difficult as hers, but there were times I struggled. Thank God I didn’t walk away when I suspected an affair. Thank God my heart kept an iron grip on her and wouldn’t let me move. The frustration, the unknowing, the jealousy… it was grueling, but reinforced one of the first things I said to Lana: ‘It was worth it as soon as I saw you’.
And it was. It was more than worth it. It was the start of my life, the day my heart started beating.
I love this woman. I will always love her, as will every part of my soul.”
― Alessandra Torre, quote from Black Lies
“des méchants ou un orage avaient rompu l'une des principales branches du jeune arbre, qui pendait desséchée; Fabrice la coupa avec respect, à l'aide de son poignard, et tailla bien net la coupure, afin que l'eau ne pût pas s'introduire dans le tronc. Ensuite quoique le temps fût bien précieux pour lui, car lé jour allait paraître, il passa une bonne heure à bêcher la terre autour de l'arbre chéri. Toutes”
― Stendhal, quote from The Charterhouse of Parma
“Do I dare disturb the universe?
Yes, I do, I do. I think.
Jerry suddenly understood the poster--the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from The Chocolate War
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