The Glassmaker

you never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

Even if I had known, I would never have told them. Torture does not deserve an answer.

A pearl needs grit to be beautiful; beauty comes from the scar on the lip, the gap in the teeth, the crooked eyebrow.

...you never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. Painters, writers, wood-carvers, knitters, weavers and, yes, glassmakers: creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing.

But once children outnumbered adults, it was impossible to control them.

Nature was continuing its march, indifferent to human suffering. Whatever was happening to people, the world would always be here, the tides flowing in and out, the flowers blooming, the birds singing. It was not an original idea, she knew, but she found it comforting. In a way, humans too continued their march, eating and sleeping and making and loving, whatever the circumstances.

My beads have gone everywhere—even to Africa. But I have gone nowhere. I want to go somewhere.

reminder that you never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

When you already know how to do something, it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t.

The stone has crossed most of the lagoon, because you have thrown it that hard...

And then the plague properly took hold of the city. The Venetian provveditori alla sanità swung into action, delegating citizens in

Venice by Jan Morris (1960) and A Brief History of Venice by Elizabeth Horodowich

creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which

Whatever else was going wrong in her life, this process of creation was still in her hands and her eyes, still satisfying, still comforting.

each sestiere to monitor the cases in their area, keeping count of infections and deaths, boarding up houses where plague victims lived, working out whom they had been in contact with and confining them to their houses. Whole streets and sections of the city were closed off, with no trade or travel allowed. Curfews were set, food markets restricted.

You don’t have to care about people to look after them. Indeed, some say emotions get in the way of looking after them.