Robin

“the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Over the course of those long hours in the booth, I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best. In those moments, out of what I can only describe as an excess of imagination, he became the person whose perspective I occupied. I flinched when the proceedings seemed to go against him, I felt quiet relief when they moved in his direction. It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy. I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable. With increasing frequency, I avoided looking down into the courtroom, I concentrated on the notes on the page before me, on the words being spoken into my earpiece.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Omnia vincit amor. Love conquers all things. —VIRGIL”
― Lisa Scottoline, Eternal