Toby's Room (Life Class Trilogy Book 2)

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

the one thing this war has shown conclusively is how amazingly and repulsively belligerent women are. Some women

She didn’t know how to leave him behind in the Dissecting Room, where, session after session, the slim girls swarmed over him like coffin beetles, reducing him to the final elegance of bone.

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

in the garden who’ll win, I think

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.

And then he was off, on the uselessness of drawing from the Antique, the blind worship of the past, the failure to engage in any meaningful way with the realities of modern life and, above all, Tonks’s deplorable tendency to devote too much time to teaching women and useless men.

It reminded Elinor of the roof of King’s College Chapel,

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