Rose Bowett

“Openness and sincerity were prized above all else under a governing practice of radical tolerance, in which speaking about anything at all could yield only benefit and in which secrets could develop only into shameful wounds.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter. Don't we love a cashed check, a passport, the touch of a president's hand, though each pleasure rests on a cruelty just beyond our sight? The finger points, without equivocating, at us, and we wonder at being chosen.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Because abstraction can never convey fact in a precise way. It can't be made to convey anything precisely.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood

“What one longs to do above all, I think, is to reinvent appearances, make it stranger, and more exciting. That's what's so extraordinary about Velazquez: he reinvented the very outline of appearance. You only have to look at the way things are in his paintings. He managed to come back to appearance by way of something that lay quite outside the kind of illustration that was expected of him at the time.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood