Quotes from Dominic Smith

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.

It's the look you give a well-behaved imbecile, an insurance policy against cosmic malevolence.

We're conduits for the universe's desire to think about itself.

memorized the entire set of

Louis] knew on some level that fame is not the story we tell; it is the story the world tells us. And the world was telling Louis it wanted to see itself reflected in gouache and charcoal of painted calico; that the human eye longed to trust the illusion of likeness. Render perfectly a meadow at dusk, a horizon at dawn, and people will love you for it. For giving them something they didn't know they already had.

What you do isn't who you are.

She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that's remotely graceful. He'll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs.

New Jersey always surprises him, a state known for its turnpikes that should be known for its coastlines and bayside hamlets.

Milo still sported the same mustache I remembered from my childhood visits—a big swooping throwback to nineteenth-century lumbermen and prospectors. Now speckled gray and white, it curled down to enclose his small, thin-lipped mouth parenthetically. This had always made sense to me, since Milo spoke in asides.

The skyline is beautiful but also desolate and otherworldly. It comes at you by degrees, as you descend the hill, and then suddenly you're a diver coming upon the hulk of some ravaged galleon at the bottom of the sea.

So much of Valetto is negative space, I thought as I walked along, the conjuring of imaginary forms, but then you turn a corner and see the curled Cs of a dozen sleeping cats in the piazza, the clay-potted geraniums on the edges of stone stairs, the winter rooftop gardens, or the old man in a leather apron walking to the church every hour to ring the bronze bells, and you feel certain that this town of ten will be here forever.

Was this where my fascination for documented history came from? From a family so afraid of earthly erasure that they couldn't discard the transcript of ordering two pounds of prosciutto on June 15, 1988?

Susan is the opposite," I said. "She's big on feelings and insights, though she has an economist's way with words. When she asks why I'm walking through an abyss of loneliness it sounds like she's reading a nutrition label.

What other half-buried things did I know about my own grief and wife that, if asked about directly, I could surrender? That for several years I kept Clare's mobile phone active because I didn't want anyone else to take her phone number. That during the time before I released the number, I sent her texts from work, only to come home and read them on the phone that was always charging by her side of the bed.

The bell ringer's green walnut liqueur was famous in Valetto for its ability to strip paint and dignity.

What else is there to say? You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again.