art details

Jean-Étienne Liotard — Mademoiselle Louise Jacquet (detail). 1748-1752

William Holman Hunt — Isabella and the Pot of Basil (detail). 1868

Carlo Crivelli — Saint Catherine of Alexandria (detail). 1476

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

— Erich Maria Remarque, from "All Quiet on the Western Front" (translated by A. W. Wheen)

"The term “postmemory” is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. That is not to say that survivor memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor re-create."

— Marianne Hirsch, from "Projected Memory"

" [...] Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding what's going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary - and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts."

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in conversation with Rolf Dobelli

“The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.

“I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.

"It’s almost impossible to explain—but in Italian, I can be the Jhumpa who goes to buy a sandwich from the Calabrian couple at the market by the Porta Portese, who goes to the pool in Trastevere, and when I say hi to the person swimming laps in the lane next to mine they won’t have the faintest idea of my other life. Those are the moments I feel most alive and at ease. Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules, that I can be who I want and write what I want on my own terms. It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own. In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized."

— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.

“It is a mysterious thing, falling in love with another language—we don’t talk about it enough when it happens.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.

“After I won the Pulitzer … My parents were stunned, and extremely proud, but I remember my father said, ‘You should always have a backup plan. You’re like a politician now, and you will go in and out of favor.’”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.

"I love him, his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure – and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace [...]."

— Erich Maria Remarque, from "All Quiet on the Western Front" (translated by A. W. Wheen)

Vincent van Gogh and his skies.

Jacob van Walscapelle — Flowers in a Glass Vase. circa 1670. details

Charles Ethan Porter — Peonies in a Vase. details. circa 1885