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Remington also makes rifles.
this was a moment of suspension, a girl trapped by the eternity of dusk. The
It was important to walk among your own thoughts, he seemed to be saying, to plunk down on a bench somewhere and let the world roar along without you for an hour.
The lie comes effortlessly, a dead bolt sliding into a groove.
And yet here she is with an exact replica of a social life out on her veranda, but not the thing itself.
She’s seeing this from a height, Ellie thinks, and it lends the scene an air of detachment, the perspective of an indifferent God.
because Qantas likes to refrigerate the first-class cabin like they’re hauling steaks across the Pacific.
There’s a submarine quality to the experience, a sense of dredging the bottom instead of scraping up against the stratosphere.
Ellie was part of the reason, but there were other parts that defied explanation, some dark and mysterious sense of circling back or making amends or just reappearing in another time zone, defying time and death.
she reminds him of Gretchen, another name from a lost decade
She makes coffee for Max—milk with two sugars—and Marty can feel some layer of respect he’d felt for the man strip away.
“I could hear that she’s got an accent of some kind, though I’m not prepared to narrow it down beyond South African, British, or Australian. Boston is also not out of the equation.”
What we’re trying to buy, when we buy art, is ourselves.
Claude is the name of a man who walks out of rooms in the middle of arguments.
hearth. The painting contains all this. It is about the moment before nightfall, about waiting to cross over.
sense of a misplaced calling, that Helen should have become a UN weapons inspector instead of a painting conservator.
“This lineup’s weak. I feel like I’m at a garage sale in Newark.”
They suggest there are a thousand dead white afternoons that wait for us all.
Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still,
She lets it hang in the air too long, so that when she answers she sounds calculating instead of enthusiastic.
Her life suddenly seems interesting and full, as if a glaze has shocked a muted underlayer into color.
lectern, her hair long and completely gray, pulled back at the seams in the manner of academics and archivists and feminist poets.
Ellie thinks of how the world is governed by couples, how unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure.
tuxedo, a rental at that, dressed like a sound engineer at the Academy Awards.
his skin is the color of weak tea. It’s the chromatic certainty of death.
