Paris Still Life Quotes

“It’s not surprising, with your father appearing to you, only on rue Mouffetard, not on the ramparts of a castle. But really, your Shakespeare knew all this, four hundred years ago, and all we have done since is make him into a monument and forget what he says.” I leaned to pour more wine into his glass. The two of us, naked and warm enough on a summer evening in front of open windows in a darkening room, our bodies drying after lovemaking, our secrets open to each other, the world opening up to our words, it seemed, becoming both more complex and more knowable as we talked. I thought, This is what I wanted, what I needed, and I didn’t know it. This is what I have been traveling toward. This openness, this sense of possibility, this ability to be still, in the present, and have the world fall open around me to be marveled at and understood. Yves said, “I believe that intuition and imagination are simply another way of thinking. You know, here in France, thinking has been so rational and scientific. It’s as if everything else has been marginalized. But when we create something, for instance, a work of art, a book, whatever it is, we are simply using a rapid and effective way of thinking.”
― Rosalind Brackenbury, Paris Still Life

“Caesar’s ghost on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. We ignore them at our peril; we listen to them at the risk of our sanity. A French poet said, by the end of life, we all contain libraries and graveyards. It seemed to have happened to me already, my familiarity with both. I knew I had to get help with this now,”
― Rosalind Brackenbury, Paris Still Life