Quotes from Toby Alone

“[Toby] reflected that being cruel sometimes makes you rich and powerful, but it always makes you ugly.”
― Timothée de Fombelle, quote from Toby Alone

“Little tree filled his lungs with the white airness of the night, as if he were going to fly.
The living voice of his parents. Elisha's eyes. These were reasons enough to set off on another adventure.
Reasons to be Toby Lolness again.”
― Timothée de Fombelle, quote from Toby Alone

“Quando un bambino di sette anni, isolato e sempre solo, scopre che a meno di una giornata di cammino c’è un altro bambino della sua età, è capace di tutto per trovarlo. È la magia della calamita, che i bambini conoscono bene.
E anche gli innamorati.”
― Timothée de Fombelle, quote from Toby Alone

“Ma quando si trovò a festeggiare il compimento del terzo giorno con un panino duro accompagnato da un piatto di muffa, e si rese conto che gli mancavano centodiciassette giorni da passare a quel modo, capì che non si vive soltanto di aria, acqua, calore, luce, cibo e consapevolezza del tempo.

Ma insomma, cos’aveva da lamentarsi? Cosa voleva ancora? Di cosa si vive, oltre che di tutte queste cose?

Si vive degli altri.

Questa fu la sua conclusione.”
― Timothée de Fombelle, quote from Toby Alone

“Cậu để lại trên mặt nước một cái vỏ sò nhỏ màu đỏ rực mà cậu nhặt được, rồi ra về. Mảnh sò trôi dần về phía Elisa. Cô bé cầm lên khi nó giạt vào những nếp gấp của chiếc váy bập bềnh trên mặt nước, tạo nên những mảnh lụa xanh trải rộng.”
― Timothée de Fombelle, quote from Toby Alone

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“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.”
― Bob Dylan, quote from Chronicles, Volume One

“Your taste in music is excellent. It exactly coinsides with my own!”
― Robert Bolt, quote from A Man for All Seasons

“I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Fever Pitch

“Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge”
― Julian Barnes, quote from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

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