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Book: The Light in the Ruins
Quotes of Book: The Light in the Ruins

Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
book-quote murder stray-kittens
Chris Bohjalian _ 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 spanthe 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
book-quote war ruins
Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ The Light in the Ruins
We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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Chris Bohjalian _ 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.
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