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The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin

Book by Peter Levi · 2 quotes · Afganistán, Bashgul River, Constellations

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AllAfganistánBashgul RiverConstellationsJesuitsLanguageMalcolm LowryMosquePoint Of DepartureSaint IgnatiusSpecificityStarlightTehran

The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin Quotes

“The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.”

LanguageConstellationsStarlightTehranSpecificityJesuitsPoint Of DepartureMalcolm LowrySaint Ignatius
Book:The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin
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“later i sat in the mosque balcony as the sun rose, watching while it unpicked the dark and misty folds of the forest and coloured the Bashgul river. We were all overcome by the fabulous richness of the landscape, the opulence of the wooden architecture, the yellow green coombes of ripening corn, the glistening trees.”

MosqueAfganistánBashgul River
Book:The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin
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