“You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.”
“It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.”
“The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?”
“Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.”
“Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.”
“What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead.”
“we can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you’re not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.”
“Well, I think that’s sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it’s like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death.”
“Sometimes I think that’s all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can’t turn off. It’s not much, but plenty when you don’t have any of it.”
“One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.”
“So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV.”
“What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.”
“Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn’t mind, I was feeling flush.”
“I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse.”
“The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.”
“I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.”
“You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.”
“It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it.”
“You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. And don’t worry, compa, you will be rowdy and out of control again. You will throw off every kind of light. You can’t help yourself.”
“I had painted a lot of landscapes, had stood before many while they burned their remote beauty into my skin, but had never done both at the same time. Don’t know why. I was comfortable painting indoors and I liked best to retrieve those images from memory where they might be stained by awe and jumbled together with other things I loved. Now that I had tried the other, I wanted to do more.”
“So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV. It made me look at the painting in a different light: that the crow was more mischievous than he seemed at first. He was handing off this idea of choice to the horse the way the serpent handed off the apple. Poor horse. It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.”
“What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It’s harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.”
“I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all.”
“I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.”
“This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.”
“Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can’t say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that.”
“I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.”
“If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn’t even stick around for it. Time present and time future.”
“Isn’t that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love.”
“It's called 'You Just Don't Exist.' I'm co-starring with Winifred Hailey. It's like, a romantic comedy.”
“In the midst of life, we are in death.”
“The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.”
“You removed my spectacles!”
A disbelieving snort of laughter escaped him. “The way you’re taking on, you’d have thought I removed
your clothing!”
Samantha clutched at the high-necked bodice of her homely bottle-green day dress. “How do I know
you didn’t?”
Silence hung between them, thicker than the heated air. Then his smoky voice dipped into low and
dangerous territory. “If I had removed your clothing, Miss Wickersham, I can assure you it would have
been worth waking up for.”
“Better not to start down a wrong path at all than head down it in the hope of making a detour when something better came along.”
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