Toby's Room (Life Class Trilogy Book 2)

fishermen: darting eyes, caught in nets of wrinkles,

some of the best writing about place has been done in exile.

I want to go somewhere where you don’t have the past sitting on the back of your neck like a fucking dead weight. New York, Chicago. We’re a nation of fucking caryatids. It’s squashing us.

we all feel guilty. Everybody who survives.” “Do you?” “Every minute of every day.

I think a very large part of art is about celebration, but then you also have to paint what’s in front of you, don’t you? And your generation hasn’t been very lucky in that respect.

Portraits celebrate the identity of the sitter. Everything—the clothes they’ve chosen to wear, the background, the objects on a table by the chair—leads the eye back to the face. And the face is the person. Here, in these portraits, the wound was central. She found her gaze shifting continuously between torn flesh and splintered bone and the eyes o

Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.

Everything he saw, everything he felt, seemed to be filtered through his memories of the front line, as if a thin wash had been laid over his perceptions of this scene. Columns of sleety rain marched across the fields while, in the distance, gray clouds massed for another attack. Somehow or other, he had to connect with the present, but he found it

smell, the most primitive of the senses, the one most closely linked to memory and desire,