Luminous Chaos Quotes

“... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“This isn't the time for bravado, Mr. Orsini,' he said.

Brentford couldn't help himself. 'No, it isn't,' he said. 'Perhaps you could come back later?”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“... even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself 'I am an overcoat' just because he happened to be wearing one?”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“The news took a moment to sink in, probably because there was no bottom for it to alight upon.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.'

'Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“I have heard about your gifts myself, Miss Roth,' read the subtitle under Brentford's awkward mumble.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos