Quotes from Dominic Smith

They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.

Love is not like choosing a partner for whist. It has a life of its own. our duty is merely to follow its call.

The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating.

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.

The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.

Maybe memory is just electricity passing through us. Old voltage in the joints.

The body thinks it's real. That's the problem of modern physics. How to convince our minds that they're not our own.

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?

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.

It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest.

But everything is how it should be. How's that for wisdom?

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.

daughter's death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas.

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

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

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.

The past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him.

Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still,

The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone's moving furniture underwater.

There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.

Nothing in the world is more sinister than a child's coffin.

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.

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.

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,