Beautifully written, this book about a painting and a forgery is definitely worth reading. It moves seamlessly between three time periods: the seventeenth century, the late 1950s, and the present time, creating and retaining the suspense that holds the story together. While sketching the life of the fictional Dutch artist Sara de Vos and describing …
In the beginning we feared everything – animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky – everything except each other. Now we fear each other and almost nothing else.
Gregory David Roberts
“Patriarchy teaches us that emotions are untrustworthy. One of the reasons we’re in a global situation of violence and anger, violence largely driven by men, is because men have not been given the tools to be honest about their own emotional lives.”
Brittney Cooper
‘What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.’ Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
‘Whenever there is a waiting room, there is always a wall and a door, or some other kind of division, separating the now from the then.”
‘Is it right to do something only because everyone else is doing it?’ Anthony Doerr
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them: the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
Anatole France
… if you knock down an argument that threatens privilege and power, you always face the prospect of the argument being refined and returning to vex you. But if you utterly destroy the person who is bold or foolish enough to open their mouths and question you in the first place, you dramatically reduce the chances of anything like that happening again.
John Birmingham
“Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed.” Richard Flanagan
“Politicians were subject to the whims of party leaders, contributors, pressure groups, and the media. As modern ‘celebrities’ they suffered all the moral and philosophical distortions of that class, too often taken with their own inflated personae on radio and television.” Martin Gross