natura fabularis

"All these fragments of memory...so we can retreat from the grand story and stumble accidentally upon a luxury, one of those underground pools where we can sit still. Those moments, those few pages in a book we go back and forth over."

“Sweeter than the early morning in summer.”

“The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.”

Children are not reliable keepers of time, but neither is Arcadia. Who, then, can say whether the girls spent hours or minutes in that enchanted wood?

No doubt in Holland, when van Gogh was a boy, there were swans drifting over the green sea of the meadows, and no doubt on some warm afternoon he lay down and watched them, and almost thought: this is everything. What drove him to get up and look further is what saves this world, even as it breaks the hearts of men.

“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly.”