The Last Supper Quotes

“In the morning I walk across the fields in a bright, arid light. When I return I can hear the grand piano being played through the open windows. I stand in the garden and listen. The lucidity of the sound seems more real to me than anything we have left behind us, than home, than the days whose repetition had laid a kind of fetter over my soul. In its solitariness it speaks to my own single nature. It startles me a little, to be spoken to; as though my life, the life of home, were a fake, and the real life was roaming somewhere in the world, fleet-footed, unique, uncapturable, to be glimpsed sometimes through an open window, and then to vanish again.”
― Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

“In January, meeting a friend at Bristol airport, I stood at the arrivals gate and watched as people poured in from the Canary Islands, from Tenerife. Back they came,in their shorts and string vests and sombreros, in their tanned orange skin; back they came to the bad-tempered homeland and went whooping out through the automatic doors into its dark and inhospitable evening. In a way, I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so, with human beings or with anything else. There has to be a reckoning, an accounting. There has, at some point to be the truth.”
― Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

“There are people in here, tourists, though of a superior kind. They pass through the rooms quietly, in groups. They are mostly of late middle-age, and well turned-out: there are no giant khaki shorts and tennis socks here, no baseball caps or long lenses. These people have expensive jewellery and leather handbags and polished shoes. They stand in front of one painting after another while their guide lectures them in dispassionate global English. They like to be lectured, it is clear. Their bright eyes pay attention; their lipsticked mouths do not move. They have a look of health about them, as though they were receiving some rigorous but beneficent cure. They are art lovers: it is culture that is purifying their blood and keeping their spines so straight.”
― Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy