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Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.
Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.
The richer people like her get, the fewer things they like, until eventually they become so rich that they even hate other rich people, and that’s actually the only thing Louisa almost likes about them.
Lady, Louisa thinks, if I’d wanted to destroy the painting, this entire building would be ashes by now. I’m insanely good at destroying things, lady. Everyone I love dies.
They came from another country, Louisa remembered nothing about it. She never found out what they left behind, but it can’t have been good if this place was better.
If you’re five years old when your parent leaves you, the leaving didn’t happen on one particular day, it happens every day. It never stops.
She never found out who had bought the postcards and left them there, but it was probably someone like her, someone who had passed through the home and wanted to tell the children who came after that there was a different world out there. Art is empathy.
her mother had drunk herself to death. Drowned from the inside. A child’s brain is so imaginative, Louisa heard this but didn’t grow up afraid of alcohol, just horribly afraid of swimming.
Imagination is a child’s only weapon.
The police scare Louisa far more than violence,
Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.
The kids on the pier weren’t supposed to be anything at all, they were supposed to be born poor and die poor, because that’s how the world is constructed. They got into fights at school and got beaten at home, they knew exactly how a key sounds in a lock when a father comes home dangerously drunk, they knew perfectly well that they were stupid and worthless because they had been told that the whole way through their childhoods.
Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.
The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.
He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.
That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.
The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning? Endless! Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second.
It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color.
That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.
Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.
In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.
Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.
Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.
the ultimate expression of love is nagging, we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that, and so do all best friends.
the strangest thing that can happen to a middle-aged man in the middle of an argument is for him to suddenly win.
It’s the job of fourteen-year-olds not to be great at things, the only expectation they have to live up to is to be morons, they’re put on this earth so their moms and dads will support the headache-pill industry. It really, really isn’t the job of fourteen-year-olds to be geniuses.
When sufficiently wealthy people want something bad enough, it becomes invaluable, because then art isn’t experienced through the eyes, but by the ears, they’re not paying for a picture but for its name and history. In their world it isn’t the artist who should be admired, it’s the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value. That’s why the children on the painting are so important that they’re protected by guards, but the children on the pier in real life could die without anyone even caring.
He didn’t know a damn thing about art, his hands just drew for the same reason that some feet dance: they don’t know how to stop.
Because Joar was dangerous, but the world was always more dangerous. The world is undefeated.
Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.
People always said he was extraordinary, but he was just like everyone else, at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.
“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,”
Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.
Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.
He didn’t often sound as vulnerable as that. So Ted replied gently, because he knew exactly which quote Joar meant, it was from Beta Ray Bill: “If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”
“Because loyalty is a superpower.”
“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,” Ted says.
that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.
Art is a nakedness, you have to be free to decide when you’re comfortable with it, and with whom.
die. Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety.
The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.
Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”
art was his homeland. Hers too. That was how they survived reality.
Art is nothing for people with armor, you need a thin skin, but someone like that isn’t only sensitive to beauty, but to everything.
You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.
In the seat beside them, a baby is sleeping in her mother’s arms, the mother dozing in her baby’s breath. Perhaps she was a different sort of person once upon a time, but now she’s one of those who will always answer the phone on the first ring.
what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.
The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man.
Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.
