More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“You invite the lions to a dinner party and sometimes they bite.”
IN THE LONG UNRAVELING OF HER LIFE, Sara will always come back to the leviathan.
She has traveled halfway around the world, she thinks, to live in studious squalor.
a girl trapped by the eternity of dusk.
“The old country is in my blood,”
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 clocks didn’t stop running just because something struck her fancy.
The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating.
Hendrik has become a scab on the knee of a Wednesday afternoon and they’re eager to pick at it.
Darkness at high altitude, the midflight quietude, always makes him think of the bottom of the ocean. There’s a submarine quality to the experience, a sense of dredging the bottom instead of scraping up against the stratosphere.
What we’re trying to buy, when we buy art, is ourselves.
They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.
For Bob and Maggie Shipley, her going away to boarding school on an art scholarship was the equivalent of moving to Ecuador or dying at a young age.
He has a kind face, she thinks, the face of a man who’s spent his life around horses and roses.
They suggest there are a thousand dead white afternoons that wait for us all.
“The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”
Then he was gone, the door closed, the era over.
He wants Ellie to know it’s possible to belong to both worlds, that he swims in the high and the low registers of the city.
The predictability of it is both heartening and its own kind of ruin.
I just find it difficult to like people.”
Maybe that’s why we like old paintings—our fathers were trapped by the past.”
Do you know that Duchamp lives in Lower Manhattan and hasn’t painted in decades? He says his life is the art now.”
He’s spent his whole life here and yet there are neighborhoods that are as dark and unknowable to him as the Congo.
Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers.
cards, tankards, and petticoats have ruined more than one young man.
keeping a man company is not the same as keeping a man’s interest,
How remarkable, she thinks, the way paintings trap light and time. Father Barry used to call it starlight, the passage of pigments on canvas across the centuries.
If not actual and abiding happiness it was at least contentment buoyed by occasional moments of bracing pleasure.
“All art contains desire.
“I was raised to feel things and not speak them.”
“We need to get a head start on those Albany widows. They’ve been up since four planning for the ancient blood sport of antiquing.”
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. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with.
Maybe this is why the rich are so good at self-deprecation, she thinks, because it offsets the perfection of their clothes and houses and lives.
As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was the graveyard where she’d buried her twenties.
She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.
You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again.
Of course the past was still alive and throbbing in the veins of the present.
“It would be a lie if I said all is forgiven.” “Let’s not lie.”
So, goodbye, then. Please take great care of yourself. I consider you an extraordinary person who happened my way.”
You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you’d been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things.
She lets him exaggerate his stories and talk her through the five constellations that he knows before they drift toward sleep. This seems like the truest kind of love to her.
Eventually, I was undone by time and circumstance and lead-tin yellow.
There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.
The widow somehow carries the burden of inherited wealth.
Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it’s really noonday sun.
