I just started reading “The giant squid” by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn’t find the official English translation, so here’s the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All’inizio c’era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po’ di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi… invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

Let’s go with something more somber.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

-Lolita by Nabokov

It’s not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.

And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.

“A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism”

It still gives nightmares to the people who deserve it :)

Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday’s autobiography.

“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

Late to the party, but:

A vessel may be defined as an object that keeps the water either in or out; it is the latter sort that concerns us.

The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1984

The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off

deleted by creator

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.”

• Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn’s Book by William Kennedy

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

-John Dies at the End

And my personal favorite…

I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.

-The Unnoticeables

Haha someone named him Eustace!

I managed to finish that series with my son but daaaang is it weirdly religious.

The building was on fire, and this time it was not my fault.

Here’s an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:

Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell… And…To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.