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A beautiful summer’s day, if only you could forget there was a war on.
Entering the world with no experience at all. Weren’t we all like that?
Fate? It is a gift. According to Dante, anyhow.
It’s simply the dead body of a young man being presented to his mother, said Darnley. Oldest story in the world, said Evelyn. Which is? Grief, Temps. Just a lot of fucking grief.
I am a privileged cliché, Miss Skinner— Oh, I think we’ve all been one of those, Captain— Unqualified for anything except oenology or the occasional attribution.
It’s what we’ve always done. Left a mark on a cave, or on a page. Showing who we are, sharing our view of the world, the life we’re made to bear. Our turmoil is revealed in those painted faces – sometimes tenderly, sometimes grotesquely, but art becomes a mirror. All the symbolism and the paradox, ours to interpret. That’s how it becomes part of us. And as counterpoint to our suffering, we have beauty. We like beauty, don’t we? Something good on the eye cheers us. Does something to us on a cellular level, makes us feel alive and enriched. Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the
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You be careful, Peg. Don’t you go falling. Here’s to falling and being caught, said Peg and she raised her glass.
No one back home could understand what occupation did to a people. The deprivation of body and soul. The daily choice to survive but at what cost and sometimes at what cost to others.
The scale of man – spatially – is about midway between the atom and the star.
the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.
How Ulysses’ gaze made her think she was something, or something enough. How she was glad to be away from her mother. How she saw a woman dressed as a man and thought how interesting life could be, might be. The type of day that showed her where she ended, and the world began.
the responsibility of privilege must always be to raise others up.
People listening to him, not laughing.
This is my best day ever, she said. There’ll be more, he said. I know. I’m only five.
No single act of generosity remains in isolation. The ripples are many.
There are moments in life, so monumental and still, that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all.
There was something regal in the way life was unfolding.
Tree said, Thanks for everything. It’s been nice knowing you. You too, said Cress. Will you be OK? I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before. Done what? Goodbyes. Really? Think about it. Leaves.
We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open.
In truth, he’d never felt more alive since Ulysses had entered his life.
You may not feel it, but you have a place here. Let things settle.
The island had done its best. Had grounded them and introduced them to a way of life they would aspire to and return to.
This is what we’re governed by, Alys. Space, time and motion. Hours, days, seasons.
What’s the difference? Shoes or a mother, lack is lack and it hurts.
a curse and a blessing to love someone so completely
And he became aware of the universe, that endless canopy of chance and wonder.
Go forth, go learn, go love!
How excited she felt, how invigorated. Adventure, the best medicine.
Flesh and love always next to blue. Such a precocious display of spring.
We’ll never know the inner life lived out within those walls. The what-could-have-been. We have so much more freedom than those who went before. And you will have so much more than me.
She couldn’t imagine herself old, but she could imagine herself no longer young.
outer and inner is in constant opposition. The world of the domestic kitchen is a female world (she underlined this). It is a world of routine, of body and of bodily function. A world of blood and carcass and guts and servitude. Men may enter but they do not work there and yet work is all that women do there.
The power of still life lies precisely in this triviality. Because it is a world of reliability. Of mutuality between objects that are there, and people who are not. Paused time in ghostly absence.
I said you could never disappoint me, Alys. I’m proud of every inch of you. Every minuscule part of your being. Of your thoughts and your joy and your rage. The way you sing and navigate your way in this often godforsaken— I love a girl. (PAUSE.) Lucky girl, I say —world.
Me and Poppy were like that for a while. I wanted a Bentley and she wanted a Jag. What happened? Compromised. Got one each. We need any cheese for tonight?
thinking what words can give the experience value. How to explain to her that the improbability of love, which she feels will last forever, will one day shine its light again. What words of consolation can be offered? What words of reassurance can I give her that a life lived without the object of her love is still worthwhile and hers for the taking?
As if he knew what she was feeling and his silences, his calm veneer wasn’t passivity at all, but quiet reflection, the hidden pain of something unmentionable.
she turned up every day and she practised her craft and that was significant.
If I can’t do it for people in need, what’s the point of being rich?
But we keep going, we always have. We keep cleaning and when we remember to, we keep singing. And one day, we will triumph once more.
Some of the best days of my life, he said. And wouldn’t they all say that in time? The shared loss became the shared bond.
I Do Love Nothing in the World So Well As You
Loss and love. The only ingredients required.
because in the space between artist and sitter could be found understanding and forgiveness and maybe love.
Her beauty had been her currency. Always had been. No one talked about when the bank ran dry as it inevitably would. All those books she never read. All those museums she’d rubbished as brain-box boring. Cressy said it took effort to turn a page. Takes patience and care, Peg. Takes a leap of grace to say I don’t know.
And Alys came to understand why women would seek refuge on a bridge and she drew their youth, their pain, their ageing. Their existence and worth given shape by a virgin who birthed a child. She drew the lives they’d given up in the microscopic study of a flower, a vase, a cup, a plate, a piece of fabric – lace intricate and fine – darned sheets on a bed, a sketchbook in the corner, a fine lock of baby hair hidden between two pages. On and on and on, she drew the details of undetailed lives. Of forgotten women who once may have wanted so much more.
There was something noticeable about these globes. How sorrow ran tributary to beauty. There was a majesty to them, something delicate and precious and startling.
We’re still living in the footprints of the French Revolution, of Hitler and Mussolini. Scratch the surface of the varnish and it raises its head again. Evil was defeated but it never went away. This is something we must live with, Ulysses.
She had, moments before, turned ninety-nine but she looked ten years younger, something she would put down to cod liver oil and cold-water swimming and being loved.
