Furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine,
And though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.
And the stainless-steel fridge was always well-stocked with Girl Food: hummus and olives, cake and champagne, lots of silly take-out vegetarian salads and half a dozen kinds of ice cream.
A gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over.
You'd be surprised, Theo. she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for th...
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but...
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle,...
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I’d ever said came back...
Well, the Dutch invented the microscope, she said. They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something.
Well - think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, made no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no - hang on - this is a question worth struggling with. What...
Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.
The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and s...
The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, career, marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest...
The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real gr...
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred time...