Dominic Smith > Quotes

“They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts. What”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Love is not like choosing a partner for whist. It has a life of its own. our duty is merely to follow its call.”
― Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

“The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It's cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted small items and the practice of fine motor skills.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn't get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over in his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, late-night revelers in the taverns…. Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it's really noonday sun.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Maybe memory is just electricity passing through us. Old voltage in the joints.”
― Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel

“Every morning I stand here and watch the sun gild the trees and the grottoes. It’s like drawing a breath before the day begins in earnest.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Can you create a vacuum out of a human life? A state where everything’s possible but nothing very likely? Does something new emerge when there’s no more empty space?”
― Dominic Smith, The Beautiful Miscellaneous

“No, no, Claude thought, the past never stops banging at the doors of the present. We pack it into tattered suitcases, lock it into rusting metal trunks beneath our beds, press it between yellowed pages of newsprint, but it hangs over us at night like a poisonous cloud, seeps into our shirt collars and bedclothes.”
― Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel

“The body thinks it’s real. That’s the problem of modern physics. How to convince our minds that they’re not our own.”
― Dominic Smith, The Beautiful Miscellaneous

“You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and the building doorman. ou no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing aid calibrations.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The lights have been dimmed and the window is awash in the blackness and he can see a hairline fracture of dawn against the horizon.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“She looks out the window and notices the sections of Cleveland Street gone to rot, the filigreed metal balconies of the shambling terraces like rusted lacework, the grimy tiled pub facades, the windows of the Lebanese restaurants filmed with grease. This is old Sydney, her father’s town of grit and mildew. The”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Couldn’t decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin?”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still,”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“But what can be learned from trivia? A history of inventions reveals we made the gun silencer (1908) before air conditioning (1911), the kaleidoscope (1817) before Braille printing (1829), cocaine (1860) before penicillin (1929). It's a story about pleasure before usefulness, about ingenuity in killing before improving our everyday lives."
The Beautiful Miscellaneous,”
― Dominic Smith

“The past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Darkness at high altitude, the midflight quietude, always makes him think of the bottom of the ocean. There’s a submarine quality to the experience, a sense of dredging the bottom instead of scraping up against the stratosphere.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Her youthful habit of consuming a picture just inches from its aromatic surface died a long time ago. Sebastian, when they were first dating, had once called it an affectation and she could never bring herself to do it again. His offhanded comment should have been a sign of future cruelties and standards of perfection, but instead she’d quickly agreed with his assessment and was grateful for his candor. She”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“daughter’s death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Nothing in the world is more sinister than a child's coffin.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“But everything is how it should be. How's that for wisdom?”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“thought of Luigi Barzini writing about the Italian family, where, he said, you could always turn for consolation, help, advice, provisions, loans, weapons, allies, and accomplices. There was something primal and unconditional about Italian familial love,”
― Dominic Smith, Return to Valetto

“Was this where my fascination for documented history came from? From a family so afraid of earthly erasure that they couldn’t discard the transcript of ordering two pounds of prosciutto on June 15, 1988?”
― Dominic Smith, Return to Valetto