What I Loved Quotes

"I felt they had the uncanny weight of things enchanted by stories that are told and retold and then told again."

"I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you pressed on the picture, and I thought that if you didn't, I would go crazy."

"It's like looking at another person's dream, isn't it?"

"The longer I live the more convinced I am that when I say 'I,' I am really saying 'we.'"

"Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you."

"In my work, I want to create doubt. Because that's what we're sure of."

"I've always wanted kids, lots of kids. For years I've had this daydream about traveling around the world and populating the earth."

"Life is sad, Leo. I've been sitting here thinking about how sad it all is."

"I suppose we are all the products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes."

"It's almost too perfect—the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white."

"I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue."

"For her, the charms of my body were related to the swiftness of my mind, and in light of this, I thought it wise to keep that higher organ tight, lean, and well-exercised."

"The medical establishment was certainly part of it, but the fact that so many women had hysterical attacks, not just women who were hospitalized for them, goes beyond doctors."

"I think her illness took the form it did because it was in the air, floating around like a virus—the way anorexia nervosa floats around today."

"Despite these momentary insights into a life, the canvases and their materials had an abstract quality to them, an ultimate blankness that conveyed the strangeness of mortality itself."

"Turn four," he said. I could hear the insistence in his voice.

"People say you're turning four, but nothing happens in your body."

"Signs have often been confused with other signs, as well as with the things that lie beyond them in the world."

"After I walked you to the subway and you kissed me good-bye, I came home, sat down on the bed, and looked at the pillow squashed by your head and the sheets wrinkled from your body."

"I've loved you since the first second I saw you."

"I thought I would have more time to chart your body, to map its poles, its contours and terrain, its inner regions."

"I want you to come back to me, but even if you don't, I'm in you now."

"Speed and strategy. That's what matters now."

"Bill had once told me that by the age of seven he had adopted a strict but private code of moral behavior."

"Neither Bill nor I had much time for coffees or lunches that year, but I also knew that Violet had altered the outlines of our friendship."

"It was a dim but irritating need for something nameless and unknown that I had felt from time to time since I was child."

"Poor Dan was all cracks. His life was a daily struggle to ward off a breakdown that would land him in the hospital again."

"Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted—something between a real woman and a beautiful thing."

"Omnipotent dreams. We all have them, but usually they live only in stories and waking fantasies, where they have license to roam."

"Making art was necessary for Bill to maintain a minimal equilibrium, to keep himself going."

"Bill told Hansel and Gretel in nine separate works. During the narrative, the figures and images grew steadily larger, reaching human scale only in the last piece."

"Words of rescue, I said to myself when I saw the writing on the man's body."

"Envy and cruelty inevitably accompany fame, however small that fame may be."

"I feel sorry for him. His only friend is Durango."

"You'd think I could just do it, because I made him up, but Uncle Bill says that it doesn't work that way, that you have to feel what's right, and sometimes what's right in art is sad."

"It isn't that I doubt the truth of them. My memory is clear."

"Because what was has disappeared, that was has become idyllic."

"I can remember what she was wearing—a long-sleeved striped T-shirt. Its round neck was cut out to reveal her collarbones and the even pallor of her winter skin."

"I had walked around with a self-image that was completely out-of-date."

"I can still see him hauling materials from Bowery Two across the field to Bill's truck, wearing tight red pants, black patent-leather boots and a deadpan expression."

"I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us."

"It's like that for everybody. We don't see ourselves in the picture, do we? It's a kind of hole."

"Sometimes I think I'll make great big paintings, and other times I think I'll make pretty small ones. I don't know which yet."

"I like things to last for a long, long time."

"We're lucky. We're lucky to have him. He's the best boy on earth."

"She's going to marry that guy she's been seeing."

"I've made up my mind, Dad. I'm going to be an artist."

"It can't be understood. It's outside our powers."

"You don't cry, Leo. You haven't cried at all, not once."

"Pain felt good—no, more than good. For an instant, I felt intense soaring relief, but it didn't last."

"My body hurt all over. Pain had settled into my arms and legs, and I suffered from a chronic stiffness in my muscles."

"It's because I shook things up, Leo. You started to hate me. Now you won't."

"We wanted other people. Not new people. Old ones. We wanted ourselves before Matthew died."

"My grief took a new turn... A part of me had known that a crack was inevitable."

"A real glass of water had not once reminded me of my son, but the image of a glass of water rendered 230 years earlier had catapulted me suddenly and irrevocably into the painful awareness that I was still alive."

"The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself—that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."

"Mark Wechsler was a few months shy of fifteen. I was sixty-two. I had known him all his life, but until then, I hadn't considered him a friend. All at once, I understood that his future was also mine, that if I wanted a lasting rapport with this boy who would soon become a man, I could have it, and the thought became a promise to myself: Mark will have my attention and care."

"I've lived with crazy people all my life, and he needs a roof. I gave him some old kitchen stuff and Violet packed up a blanket and some dishes and a hot plate she had from her apartment. He likes Violet. Calls her 'Beauty.'"

"It would've been so much better for Mark if Matthew had lived. For all of us, of course, but Matt felt the ground under his feet. Matt wanted to grow up. He would've become an artist. I believe that. He had the talent. He had the need. He had the lust for work."

"I envied you," he said. "I wished... I still wish that Mark were more like him, and I feel bad for wishing it. Matt was open to everything. He didn't always agree with me. He argued with me. I wish Mark..."

"May God shine down upon you. May God shine down upon your head and your shoulders and your arms and legs and upon your whole body with radiant beneficence. May he save you and keep you in his mercy and goodness from the shattering ways of Satan. God go with you, my son."

"I never met anybody more like me. We talk about it all the time, how we're the same."

"Lemon yellow," she said, "Strawberry red, lime green, you get the picture."

"It's hard to tell whether it's purely cynical or whether there's something else in it—a sadistic pleasure behind hacking up those fake bodies."

"We know nothing. We know absolutely nothing about anything."

"To know and yet how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all."

"The work was simulacra excreted from the culture's bowels—sterile, commercial feces meant purely for titillation."

"The medium was different. In Goya, I felt the physical presence of the painter's hand."

"Every day for two weeks Mark had come home and described his days at work to me in elaborate detail."

"Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn't say but might have said."

"I've got two cats at Mom's, Mirabelle and Esmeralda. They're like my best friends."

"It's so great that the project's about kids, especially poor kids who don't have anybody to speak for them."

"Lies rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes."

"Don't do anything you don't really want to do."

"It happened, I said to myself, but maybe Mark doesn't remember it."

"But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect."

"I was touched by Mark's loyalty and heartened by his news about school."

"Did you ever play that game when you were a kid: 'What's wrong with this picture?'"

"It's very hard to trust someone who lied in such a spectacular way."

"The clear wounding truth hit me suddenly, and it hit me hard."

"You're crazy, Uncle Leo. I don't have your card."

"I took the money because I like having money."

"Being alive is inexplicable. Consciousness itself is inexplicable."

"Morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws."

"I understood that he had accepted that his life had come to an end."

"The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero."

"He embodied everything Bill had fought long and hard against: shallow compromise, hypocrisy, and cowardice."

"Whenever an artist dies, the work slowly begins to replace his body, becoming a corporeal substitute for him in the world."

"Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it."

"We never did get around to talking about ourselves."

"In the quick lines that were Erica's hand, Bill seemed to have caught my wife's tremulous fingers."

"I understood the need to grant an aura to the work he had left behind him—a kind of spiritual halo that resists the harsh truths of burial and decay."

"The truth was my rage had already been dissipated by Bill's suffering."

"Art historians don't like to speak of this, because it suggests the magical thinking attached to icons and fetishes, but I have experienced it time and time again."

"But when I walked over to him and looked into his face, it was ravaged and his eyes were wild and staring."

"It wasn't enough. I wanted his clothes on me, touching my body, and I wanted to smoke the Camels. I've been smoking one a day. It helps."

"I'm not saying that Mark is hysterical. Medical language keeps changing. Illnesses overlap. One thing mutates into another."

"I'm not interested in meaning. I have to tell you, I don't think it's very important anymore. People don't care about it, really. Speed is important. And pictures. The quick take for short attention spans."

"The phrase 'new money' didn't begin to cover what I was looking at. These furnishings were the product of instant money—a few big sales converted into real estate so fast that the agents, lawyers, architect, and contractor must have found themselves breathless."

"I've seen Mark several times in the last week. He was here last night, as a matter of fact. I had a little gathering, but he left with some people."