Home > Work > Girl with a Pearl Earring
1 " It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily. "
― Tracy Chevalier , Girl with a Pearl Earring
2 " You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began,“but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned. "
3 " He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face. "
4 " You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes. "
5 " Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising. "
6 " I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home "
7 " I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that. "
8 " He spoke her name as though he held cinnamon in his mouth. "
9 " I heard voices outside our front door - a woman's, bright as polished brass, and a man's, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur. "
10 " I could not think of anything but his fingers on my neck, his thumb on my lips. "
11 " My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again. "
12 " There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin. "
13 " He had decided to trust me. "
14 " I did not mind the cold so much when he was there. "
15 " Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free. "
16 " I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached. "
17 " At first I could not meet his eyes. When I did it was like sitting close to a fire that suddenly blazes up. "
18 " There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting," he explained as he worked, "but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things-tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids-are they not celebrating God's creation as well? "
19 " I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be. "
20 " It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought. "
