The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.
The cure for tonsillitis was inspired. ‘Take a fat cat, skin it, draw out the guts and take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear … All this crumble small and stuff the cat, roast it whole an...
The body of Saint Mark, supposedly preserved in the basilica was the central point of the configuration between the ducal palace, the market, and the Arsenal. This was the sacred geometry of Venetian...
None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble withhistory. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.
Never be curious. It is the path to perdition.
It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes.
Is there not something more glorious about making music than making war?
I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.
I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity.
What think you of that, Nick, since you allwaies have your Head stuck in old Books? And I said nothing, for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?
The great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page
Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.
Let Stone be your God and you will find God in the Stone.
Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodl...
As the Houses tumbled upon the Streets with a great roaring Noise, they cryed out We are undone! We are great Sinners! and the like: and yet as soon as the Danger was passed, they came back with their...
Anxiety was, for her, a form of prayer.
The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unin...
Sexuality was a fluid, infinitely malleable and indefinite condition. It permeated the streets of London like the smell of pies and sweetmeats.
Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife o...