Cecilia

“Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls

“And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“she felt like a painting of a saint being assumed into heaven. The patron saint of putting up with idiots, whoever that was.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls