The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Quotes

“They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts. What”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It's cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted small items and the practice of fine motor skills.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn't get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over in his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, late-night revelers in the taverns…. Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it's really noonday sun.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“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.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and the building doorman. ou no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing aid calibrations.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Every morning I stand here and watch the sun gild the trees and the grottoes. It’s like drawing a breath before the day begins in earnest.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“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.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“daughter’s death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The lights have been dimmed and the window is awash in the blackness and he can see a hairline fracture of dawn against the horizon.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Nothing in the world is more sinister than a child's coffin.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Couldn’t decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin?”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She looks out the window and notices the sections of Cleveland Street gone to rot, the filigreed metal balconies of the shambling terraces like rusted lacework, the grimy tiled pub facades, the windows of the Lebanese restaurants filmed with grease. This is old Sydney, her father’s town of grit and mildew. The”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still,”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Her youthful habit of consuming a picture just inches from its aromatic surface died a long time ago. Sebastian, when they were first dating, had once called it an affectation and she could never bring herself to do it again. His offhanded comment should have been a sign of future cruelties and standards of perfection, but instead she’d quickly agreed with his assessment and was grateful for his candor. She”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“But everything is how it should be. How's that for wisdom?”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She hears Groen’s halting footsteps coming across the parquet floor toward her.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that’s remotely graceful. He’ll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She smiles into her drink, her breath smoking against the ice. He has never cheated on Rachel, not in fifteen years of marriage, but there’s been a lineage of near misses, office infatuations and lunches with protégées in barrettes and woolen skirts. It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest. But he feels something shifting in the space between them, a hesitation and nervousness that suggest he’s readying to cross a new line.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. 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. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“It's the look you give a well-behaved imbecile, an insurance policy against cosmic malevolence.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“What else is there to say? 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.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“New Jersey always surprises him, a state known for its turnpikes that should be known for its coastlines and bayside hamlets.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos