Within Paravent Walls Quotes

“He witnessed the destruction of everything he had ever created. These are the crippled pieces, the faces that he was stuck with; a puppet show that he could not get out of, all the strings tangled, the dead attached to the living.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Everything his parents repressed, Severin contracted and kept, collected almost, with the ambition to revive it when needed.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“This would be the room of new beginnings, the room of madness, of death, where everything needed to be cleaned and fixed for the next couple to flourish.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“He would have died rather quickly to not lose track of his wife in the afterlife.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“No one could decrypt a mother better than her own children, who had shared her body and therefore knew all of her secrets, anxieties, shortcomings, and buttons to push. Estefania feared nothing more than the betrayal of someone she accommodated and gave life to with her scarce resources.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“She knew those horrid words were addressed to her. They felt like the icy tip of an arrow meant to conjure up destruction, coming from the most venomous abyss imaginable, rammed right into her chest with the utmost authority, entitlement, and pleasure.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“She had performed as a shape-shifter with no sense of identity.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“They possessed a peaceful relic to set their child free, and the simulacrum they had fed would fade away.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“They would chase the image rising from death, expect it, but then enter an empty room with a shrine of deadened memorabilia that made them lose their minds.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“While his parents never stopped being enigmas to him, Estefania's physicality felt graspable to him, a promise that would not withdraw itself. In Estefania, he saw a world to be painted.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Why do you reduce art to an autobiography? Once a piece of art is concluded and ejected into the world it changes with every single pair of eyes and becomes an endless object of transformation. The spectator makes it his or her own. Don't decontextualize it and call it truth, call it your perspective.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Suddenly, Gabriela felt an unusual hand on her shoulder, branding itself through her clothing. Someone leaned against her body. A head now lay on her shoulder, and blond-reddish strands of hair that were not hers fell over her chest. The hand was glisteningly white with a hint of gray and overflown with blue, halted seams, and rested on Gabriela's hand like a stone on sand.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“The mother was convinced that the purchase of this piece of furniture would facilitate the bond she so hungered for with Gabriela, although she hated the unnerving history associated with the paravent. But, she thought, what could it possibly do to a child?”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“He locked himself up in his sanctuary of art and carried the keys with him at all times. He maintained the social façade for financial security. The more tragedies were shackled to his name, the more demand there was for his public persona to clean up after the family name and showcase his art to overshadow his domestic disasters. His prominent reputation in the limelight of the town kept buzzing while the man behind the infamy withered in privacy.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Estefania was an observant mother, but not for the sake of her children.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“He would not live the life of his daughter by falling apart and not giving her anything but anticipated grief and collateral heartache. He wanted to imprint paternal love on her body. Maybe she would be strong and regenerated enough to stay, and maybe his intense affection would work its magic.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Overwhelmed, she surrendered to impending motherhood, terrorized by fears and doubts, reflecting about her own mother whom she saw as an agent of trauma transferal and as the ever-expanding root in a vicious female circle.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“When she reached out to the little girl in her, nothing erupted but the dense muteness of her own children in her belly. She felt helpless, alienated from her mirror-image, perceiving her body as a shallow vessel, possessed by human beings that she never met, draining her energy and suppressing her proper self, which she considered absent again.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“She could taste her children on her tongue, the colors they wore. Jacqueline was yellow. Gunnar was blue. Gabriela had always been red. All their weight. Their history inside of her. And she remembered her mother's synesthesia and was startled as guilt crept up her throat.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Simultaneously, the child's life-mongering energy felt a metamorphosis within itself, having lost all matter and yet still being summoned by intoxicating ideas, an aching fluency of desires, a liberating rearranging buoyancy.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“The widower glanced at her wedding ring and contemplated a solitary life with his son, but then the mayhem of his marital allegiance resurfaced, and he decided not to betray her.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Ladies and Gentlemen, your history starts with your mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. You may be swimming against the stream, or you may be holding on to those very roots, but whatever you are doing, you are never without them. Your lives are a reaction to them, good or bad; every love story contains six people from the very beginning, in one form or another. Replicate them, get rid of them, but they existed, and cutting off their influence is a lifelong struggle that not all of us survive wholeheartedly.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“The triumph for Cameliano was that he found his truth of Estefania by disregarding hers, which had always been an established fact. But she deliberately embraced his intentions to cover it up.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“By the time he painted Estefania's features, her appearance had already been hag-ridden and struck by sheer madness and delusion. But he still did what so many other male painters did before him; he created an idol.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“The boundaries were destroyed; it was all in the open, the rotting animal of her soul, the tickling sickness in the tumultuous cacophony in her mother's vibrating skull that spoke only to itself in everlasting distortions.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“She was now more than ever confronted with the outward cries of help that leaped at her like an overflowing bathtub where the water had grown cold and rancid. The catastrophe had caught up with her. It had always been there, a re-emerging siren in scarlet tones, a temptation of the abysmal artillery of the brain, a carousel waltzing with crazed horses, the heel-clicking and tap-dancing back chambers where arthropods lay on their carapaces.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“That was when Estefania, who had made her pain the world’s pain, stood up, her knees dirty, shaking, her tights torn. She took a distanced look around and then she started tearing her tights even more. She kicked her expensive shoes through the wind, then she ripped off her dress, screaming as if it were burning, her second skin, her role as an actress, her one-woman show, as if she herself were on fire, as if her clothes were drenched in acid and abandoned love.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Marcelian Piaffus adored the heirloom's macabre biography, she could tell. Strangely enough, he had a disregard for its severity despite his beliefs, especially in the hands of a child, and even though Estefania had always been aware that darkness could latch itself onto objects, having grown up among unspeakable atrocities, she decided her daughter had too much grit to decline into madness.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“Gabriela's pupils were immoveable tempests, dark tunnels spiraling down into invisibility, terrifying the mother. They sat still amongst the greenish-brown puddle and attacked Estefania in total muteness.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“They had been the reason for the receding love between her and her husband. She claimed a substitution for her sacrifices, an amendment of her situation.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls