Friday, 8 July 2022

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance.

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And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a tot...
Thursday, 7 July 2022

He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange

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He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter for a co...
Wednesday, 6 July 2022

Hema felt she'd tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had travelled back to an earlier epoch

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Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here [Ethiopia] Hema f...
Tuesday, 5 July 2022

Why do so many fans love it?

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[Asimov's]  Foundation series is much beloved by many SF fans, although it suffers from a ubiquitous and debilitating dryness of tone. I...
Monday, 4 July 2022

[Tinsel] possessed all the qualities of silver plus one more – pathos

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Flaubert once said that he liked tinsel better than silver  because it possessed all the qualities of silver plus one more – pathos. … Of al...
Sunday, 3 July 2022

My nose lost track of honey and citrus, but still held a wisp of cool, clean peel, an ideal of sweetness, a thin hit of rose

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I could say this quince smelled like roses and citrus and rich women's perfume, but that isn't quite true. I could call this fruit  ...
Friday, 1 July 2022

The word "garnet" comes from "pomegranate," as does "grenade"

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 The word "garnet" comes from "pomegranate," as does "grenade," so named for the way a shrapnel-scattering gre...