Babel

‘There’s a Chinese idiom that catches the gist,’ said Robin. ‘Tùsĭhúbēi.* The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’

I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I wanted a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility. But this – this is my way out.

Diē,’ he said again. Then a laugh escaped his throat; hysterical, helpless, because it was so very funny, so apt that the romanization of father contained the same letters for death in English. And Professor Lovell was so clearly, incontrovertibly dead. There was no walking back from this. There could be no more pretending.

it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.

A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.

Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance