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41 " … it was a thing that has to fall to rise … "
― Ali Smith , How to Be Both
42 " After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at. "
43 " can’t bear it, he said. It is like your mother has become a dwarf and as if her dwarf self is always twinkling away in all the corners of the house and the yard, always in the corner of my eye. I shrugged. "
44 " Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there's a proof of love. "
45 " It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said. "
46 " Her mother has been going on and on to them (well, to George, because Henry is on a computer game) about fresco structure, about how when some frescoes in a different Italian city were damaged in the 1960s in bad flooding and the authorities and restorers removed them to mend them as best they could, they found, underneath them, the underdrawing their artists had made for them, and sometimes the underdrawings were significantly different from their surfaces, which is something they’d never have discovered if there hadn’t been the damage in the first place. "
47 " It was the weekend. She was watching a film on TV. It was about four teenage girls, friends who’d been devastated to find that they were all going to have to spend their summer holidays in different parts of the world. So they made a pact that they’d share a pair of jeans, meaning they’d send the jeans by post from one to the next to the next and so on as a sign of their undying friendship. What happened next was that the pair of jeans acted as a magic catalyst to their lives and saw them through lots of learning curves and self-esteem-getting and being in love, parents’ breaking up, someone dying etc. When it got to the part where a child was dying of cancer and the jeans helped one of the girls to cope with this, George, sitting on the floor in the front room, howled out loud like a wolf at its crapness. "
48 " Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father. "
49 " But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you. "
50 " Anyway, it was her job to subvert political things with art things, and to subvert art things with political things. Like, "
51 " The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth. "
52 " Galleries are not much like life. They are such clean places, generally. "
53 " And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see? "
54 " H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse. "
55 " Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you’d faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you’d come, follow your own thread, the thread you’d left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are – "