Furniture Painting Quotes

When it comes to life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds.

The world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house. You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you – the furniture, the paintings on the wall .... You use them – you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed – but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few ...minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone. Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room. The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years? You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room. You may star t thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built. You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.

Think of your husband as a house. You are allowed to give him a fresh coat of paint and change out the furniture now and then. But if you're constantly trying to pour a new foundation or replace the roof, you're in serious trouble.

Maybe it was possible that you could take someone out of their life and drop them in the middle of another place entirely and they could seem like someone completely different. But even if that were the case, she thought, it wasn't really 'they' change—it was just the backdrop, the circumstances, the cast of characters. Just because you painted a house didn't mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people. Deep down, at the very core, they'd still be the same no matter where they were, wouldn't they?

I'm sure you were mistaken," Yaicha says to her brush. My ears pin back - "MISTAKEN? I know who Angie is, Yaicha. I know who our father is, Yaicha. He hurts people, he hurts you, you never do anything!" My claws scrape the wall paint. She turns with soft rabbit eyes. "He'll kill me." "He's already doing that!" I am growling, grabbing her sleeve, "Every day, every day he rips you open, chips off pieces week by week, till a few years from now you are not even a mouthful of sawdust. A drawn-out killing. Well, I'm tired of all of us doing nothing. He has to be stopped." Yaicha's eyes have flinched a few times but soften again. "Nobody can stop him." My teeth show. "Nobody can stop him? Good. To him I have always been Nobody.

Aliens struck me as being rather goth. Luckily, in the daylight, there could be no more effective goth repellent than our home’s hideous furnishings. We had 1970s green and yellow linoleum floors. Neon orange and brown, scratchy, wool plaid furniture. And on the living room wall, a huge, earnest painting of two raccoons someone had made while serving a prison sentence.

...Blakewood had a collection of miniature furniture with Scotty dogs painted on it, arranged on a semicircular shelf int he corner. Yeah. He was queer.

The Citizen's attic was, objectively, breathtaking. The place was littered with trunks and old clothes and wardrobes and pieces of furniture and strange metal toys no one had played with in sixty years and half-painted canvases and on and on. There were several round windows to let in the sunlight, and I loved how it raked its way across the floor as I watched, dust dancing like sugerplum fairies in the bold yellow glow. If attics could make wishes, this one would have nothing to wish for.

What’s happened?” screamed Mrs. Twit. They stood in the middle of the room, looking up. All the furniture, the big table, the chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little side tables, the cabinet with bottles of beer in it, the ornaments, the electric heater, the carpet, everything was stuck upside down to the ceiling. The pictures were upside down on the walls. And the floor they were standing on was absolutely bare. What’s more, it had been painted white to look like the ceiling.

They always left the thermos full, ready for their return home. The five minutes devoted to that small late-night feast made them feel rather special, as if they had suddenly left the mediocrity of their lives behind them and risen a few rungs on the economic ladder. The kitchen disappeared and gave way to an intimate little drawing room with expensive furniture and paintings on the wall and a piano in one corner.

As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn't answer at first, and then I said that in many old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a color that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure, an animal, or a piece of furniture. I said that in this way too, writing was just like a painting. It was the only way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

Just because you painted a house didn't mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people.

The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.

When it comes to a life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds. Despite everything.

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins. But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around. pp. 492-493

On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its swimming pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the 1950s ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since both the main house and ranch house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art dealers when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temporarily. Once, shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry broke, Powell was making a final inspection of the furnishings and noticed that one of the paintings was missing. Worried, she asked the advance team and Secret Service what had happened. One of them pulled her aside and explained that it was a painting of a dress on a hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the Lewinsky matter they had decided to hide it. (During one of his late-night phone conversations with Jobs, Clinton asked how he should handle the Lewinsky issue. “I don’t know if you did it, but if so, you’ve got to tell the country,” Jobs told the president. There was silence on the other end of the line.)

Dreams, always dreams! and the more ambitious and delicate is the soul, the more its dreams bear it away from possibility. Each man carries in himself his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed. From birth to death, how many hours can we count that are filled by positive enjoyment, by successful and decisive action? Shall we ever live, shall we ever pass into this picture which my soul has painted, this picture which resembles you? These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these perfumes, these miraculous flowers, they are you. Still you, these mighty rivers and these calm canals! These enormous ships that ride upon them, freighted with wealth, whence rise the monotonous songs of their handling: these are my thoughts that sleep or that roll upon your breast. You lead them softly towards that sea which is the Infinite; ever reflecting the depths of heaven in the limpidity of your fair soul; and when, tired by the ocean's swell and gorged with the treasures of the East, they return to their port of departure, these are still my thoughts enriched which return from the Infinite - towards you.

People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness.

Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting I identified with. I didn't identify with anyone in any paintings. I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled Le Buffet de Vauvenargues, it showed a gigantic black sideboard [...] Svetlana said I had to take a more proactive view of my personhood. She said it wasn't okay to identify with furniture. Indeed, Sartre had illustrated "bad faith" using the analogy of thinking of oneself as a chair -- quite specifically, a chair. Objective claims could be made about a chair, but not about a person, because a person was in constant flux. I said the buffet was also in flux.

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital.

He began to describe the house to her on the flight over, and she immediately said, “I love it!” “But you haven’t even seen it yet,” he laughed, “just wait!” “It doesn’t matter!” Carol replied. “Happiness is something you choose ahead of time. How much I like the house has nothing to do with the exterior paint or the way you’ve arranged the furniture; it has everything to do with how I choose to look at it, and I have already decided to love it!

William Morris championed the movement for Arts and Crafts. He believed that when we build a house with our hands, make furniture in our workshops, make pots and paintings in our studios, plant fruits and flowers in our gardens, we transform ourselves into alchemists, turning ordinary into extraordinary.

A small brazier glowed near the monk's left hand. On a lecturn before him lay pots of paints, brushes, a quill, a pen, a knife, a sizeable handbell, the tooth of some animal--and a piece of parchment. It was the parchment that commanded the room. Until he saw it Len didn't realize how starved he had been of colour. Villagers dressed in various shades of brown and beige, like their furniture and fields and now, here, was an irruption of the rainbow, as if a charm of goldfinches had landed on the manuscript and been transfixed.

The books I enjoyed were usually long, containing descriptions of furniture and of somebody falling in love, and often had ugly nineteenth-century paintings on the cover.

I don't trust you to go alone," Charlotte said. "You'll end up getting killed in a duel with Braddock." "If I do, it won't happen before dawn at the least. There are still several hours during which you will have to obey me." "What happens to me if you're killed?" Charlotte asked. "Will I be free to do as I wish then?" "Remove that bloodthirsty look from your eye, baggage. If anything happens to me, you will be passed along with the furniture and the paintings to the next Earl of Denbigh, whoever he may be." Charlotte pursed her lips. "I think I would prefer to deal with you. At least we have reached a sort of understanding. So, if you please, I would rather you did not let the duke kill you." "I'll do my best to avoid it," he assured her.

I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do or any place I wanted to be more than home. Where I can walk around the yard, sweeping leaves off the slate paths to my heart's content. Where I can spend all day in my pajamas puttering around the house, or curled up in my favorite chair in the family room next to the big stone fireplace. The walls are papered deep red, hung with Madison's paintings and lined with our favorite books. The furniture is comfortable and inviting. Our house is made to be lived in; we use every inch of it and don't mind the signs of wear and tear. There's a deep dent in the floor next to the hearth ... It's part of the story of this house, where a family has left its mark, and where it continues to grow and evolve.

You could hate a sofa, of course—that is, if you could hate a sofa. But it didn't matter. You still had to get together $4.80 a month. If you had to pay $4.80 a month for a sofa that started off split, no good, and humiliating—you couldn't take any joy in owning it. And the joylessness stank, pervading everything. The stink of it kept you from painting the beaverboard walls; from getting a matching piece of material for the chair; even from sewing up the split, which became a gash, which became a gaping chasm that exposed the cheap frame and the cheaper upholstery. It withheld the refreshment in a sleep slept on it. It imposed a furtiveness on the loving done on it. Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.

What I could see of the apartment looked much like the office: gold high-low carpeting, Early American furniture, probably from Montgomery Ward. A painting of Jesus hung on the wall at the foot of the bed. He had his palms open, eyes lifted towards heaven- pained no doubt, by Ori's home decorating taste.

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.

I don't hate my occupation: its cadaverous ivories, its pallid crockery, all the goods of the dead, the furniture that they made, the tables that they painted, the glasses from which they drank when life was still sweet to them. Truly, the occupation of an antiquarian is a situation almost ideal for a necrophiliac

But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas (Van Gogh - The Bedroom), he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can't get in, and once you are in, you can't get out. Stifled among the furniture and everyday objects of the room, you begin to hear a cry of suffering in this painting, and once you hear it, it does not stop. 'I cried by reason of mine affliction...' But there is no answer to this cry. The man in this painting (and this is a self-portrait, no different from a picture of a man's face, with eyes, nose, lips, and jaw) has been alone too much, has struggled too much in the depthts of solitude. The world ends at that barricaded door. For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself. And it is a thing so heavy, so unbreatheable, that it cannot be shown in any terms other than what it is.

men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family’s books while simultaneously attending to their children’s health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place.

The door opened and Muriel came into the room. She looked round her a moment, smiling; and, instead of the powdered little actress she had expected, Mummie saw a tall slim girl, with light brown hair and no paint on her face, dressed simply in good clothes, a girl with wide-apart eyes who looked right amongst the furniture from New Grove House and Kicky’s drawings on the wall, and the books and the rugs. As Mummie went to greet her, Muriel ran forward and took her hands and kissed her, and said, ‘I am so glad to be here with you all’; then looked a little troubled, and lowered her voice, glancing towards the door, and said, ‘I’m in such a way about Gerald, he is starting one of his horrid colds.’ Mummie looked at the girls and smiled, Trixie nodded her head, and Sylvia and May leant back with a sigh of relief. The ewee lamb was safe in the fold at last.

On the barns were peeling painted signs for RC Cola and Chesterfields and Jergen's Furniture and Holmes Appliances. We went around the towns where these stores were. The places practically begged you to take the detours--they put up so many signs for a bypass or a loop road, you would think they were ashamed of anyone actually driving through, seeing them. Our part of the world, I felt, was unpopular to people, and I was already sorry about this.

try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?” Will thought of the small neighbour who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation. “Poor little darling!” Susila went on. “He means so well, he’s so anxious to help.” “But the paint’s on the carpet, the finger prints are all over the walls …” “So that in the end you have to get rid of him. ‘Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road.

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.

He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room. It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling. The furniture was in keeping with the room: there were three old chairs, rather rickety; a painted table in the corner on which lay a few manuscripts and books; the dust that lay thick upon them showed that they had been long untouched. A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall and half the floor space of the room; it was once covered with chintz, but was now in rags and served Raskolnikov as a bed. Often he went to sleep on it, as he was, without undressing, without sheets, wrapped in his old student's overcoat, with his head on one little pillow, under which he heaped up all the linen he had, clean and dirty, by way of a bolster. A little table stood in front of the sofa.

In the middle of the room Hippolyte remarked a card-table ready for play, with new packs of cards. For an observer there was something heartrending in the sight of this misery painted up like an old woman who wants to falsify her face. At such a sight every man of sense must at once have stated to himself this obvious dilemma — either these two women are honesty itself, or they live by intrigue and gambling. But on looking at Adelaide, a man so pure-minded as Schinner could not but believe in her perfect innocence, and ascribe the incoherence of the furniture to honorable causes.

Willa walks past Arsinoe on the way to the kitchen. “Goose and onion pie tonight.” Willa holds up a small yellow onion and chucks Arsinoe beneath the chin with it. “Mmm,” Arsinoe replies uncertainly. “Was that . . . one of my favorites?” “You do not remember?” “I don’t.” Arsinoe follows her through the sitting room, looking at the paintings and the furniture. It would not have changed much, but nothing feels familiar. “Mirabella remembers everything. If she were here, the sentimental goof would be hugging that chair.” “Even when she was a girl, Mirabella had far too much dignity to go about hugging chairs. Unlike you.

had found the only hippie-opera-singer-dream-cabin-in-the-woods in Westchester! It was perfection, and I knew exactly what to do to bring it to life. I took it on like I was an interior designer on one of those makeover shows. I picked out and paid for every piece of brand-new furniture, all the knickknacks and accouterments. I chose every detail, from light fixtures to paint colors, all in “Pat’s palette.” I hung wooden flower boxes outside and filled them with romantic wildflowers. I got photo prints made of her Irish family members and Irish crests, had them mounted and framed, and hung them ascending the wall along the staircase.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

She sinks into the armchair by the window. It's soft, deep, and striped in her favorite colors: dusty pink and green. Nearly a year and a half after Francois died, Amandine insisted on redesigning the bedroom and, although Heloise protested at the time, she's grateful for it now. The room is a fairy tale, an escape from reality, a reminder of the romance of the past instead of the grief of the present. The bed is wrought-iron with white sheets and a canopy of cream gauze. The desks, bookshelves, and matching wardrobe are all original Victorian antiques painted white. With the touch of a sparkling crystal chandelier, Amandine created a room that gives Heloise a tiny smile of pleasure every time she wakes.

Meanwhile, the cake had cooled and Grace started to spread the chocolate frosting. “Suppose you two go into the living room and wait,” she suggested. “I’ll bring in the cake and tea.” Nancy followed Allison to the adjoining room. Although it was comfortable, the room did not contain much furniture. The floor had been painted and was scantily covered with handmade rag rugs. With the exception of an old-fashioned sofa, an inexpensive table, a few straight-backed chairs and an old oil stove which furnished heat in cold weather, there was little else in the room. However, dainty white curtains covered the windows, and Nancy realized that although the Hoovers were poor, they had tried hard to make their home attractive.

Make a List (or lists) • Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option. • Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid. There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.

An English visitor to Amsterdam in 1640 could not hide how impressed he was by what he saw. In the Low Countries, wrote Peter Mundy, even houses of “indifferent quality” were filled with furniture and ornaments “very Costly and Curious, Full of pleasure and home contentment, as Ritche Cupboards, Cabinetts…Imagery, porcelain, Costly Fine cages with birds” and more besides. Even butchers and bakers, blacksmiths and cobblers had paintings and luxury trinkets in their homes.60 “I was amazed,” wrote the English diarist John Evelyn about the annual fair in Rotterdam at around the same time; it was flooded with paintings, especially with “landscapes and drolleries, as they call those clownish representations.” Even common farmers had become avid art collectors.

On Monday morning, she called me into her bedroom. Her dark hair was tousled, her light robe very feminine against the soft blue of her bed. Her eyes were full of mischief. “Oh, Mr. West,” she whispered in her beguiling child’s voice. “I’ve gotten myself into something. Can you help me get out of it?” “What can I do?” I asked, wondering who was next in line to be fired. “I’ve invited someone to stay here,” she said, “but now we’ve changed our minds.” She cast a glance in the direction of the President’s bedroom. “Could you help us cook up something so we can get out of having her as a houseguest?” Without waiting for a reply, she rushed on, her request becoming a command in mid-breath. “Would you fix up the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room so that it looks like we’re still decorating them, and I’ll show her that our guest rooms are not available.” Her eyes twinkled, imagining the elaborate deception. “The guest rooms will be redecorated immediately,” I said, and almost clicked my heels. I called Bonner Arrington in the carpenter’s shop. “Bring drop-cloths up to the Queen’s Room and Lincoln Bedroom. Roll up the rugs and cover the draperies and chandeliers, and all the furniture,” I instructed. “Oh yes, and bring a stepladder.” I called the paint shop. “I need six paint buckets each for the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room. Two of the buckets in each room should be empty—off-white—and I need four or five dirty brushes.” I met the crews on the second floor. “Now proceed to make these two rooms look as if they’re being redecorated,” I directed. “You mean you don’t want us to paint?” said the painters. “No,” I said. “Just make it look as if you are.” The crew had a good time, even though they didn’t know what it was all about. As I brought in the finishing touches, ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, Bonner shook his head. “Mr. West, all I can say is that this place has finally got to you,” he said. That evening the President and Mrs. Kennedy entertained a Princess for dinner upstairs in the President’s Dining Room. Before dinner, though, President Kennedy strolled down to the East Hall with his wife’s guest. He pointed out the bedraped Queen’s Room. “… And you see, this is where you would have spent the night if Jackie hadn’t been redecorating again,” he told the unsuspecting lady. The next morning, Mrs. Kennedy phoned me. “Mr. West, you outdid yourself,” she exclaimed. “The President almost broke up when he saw those ashtrays.

I don’t love her!” he shouted. His voice echoed through his empty apartment. He stood and toppled his coffee table, its glass top shattering as it hit the floor. He kicked the sofa several times then went on a full rampage through his lavish apartment. Every ornament got a taste of his wrath. Curtains were ripped off the railings. Paintings were hit off the wall. Vases were flung across the room. Nothing was exempt from this riotous frenzy. Loud banging. Damaged furniture. Cracked glass. Everything that was whole and complete needed to be destroyed. Everything needed to feel the same way he did. Broken… Shattered… “I don’t love her.” He collapsed hopelessly into the mess he created, not caring about the jagged pieces of glass that pierced his skin. “I don’t love her.” He shut his eyes but the tears streamed down his cheeks regardless. “Love isn’t this painful.

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

One has to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days. His children might take a certain pride in their ancient lineage, but they also made it clear that the world had moved on and they planned to move with it. Then a scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. he is polite, cheerful, and cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped this part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.

Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s. What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture. Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual. For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn’t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.

The leader of the Red Guards stepped up to Nien Cheng. “We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!” Nien Cheng held up the copy of the Constitution and looked the leader in the eye. “It’s against the Constitution to enter a private house without a search warrant.” The man grabbed the Constitution out of Nien’s hand and threw it on the floor. “The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the Revisionists within the Communist Party. We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.” One of the Red Guards took the stick he was carrying and smashed the mirror hanging over a wooden chest in the entryway. Another guard replaced the mirror with a blackboard that bore a quotation from Mao: “When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain. We must not belittle these enemies.”2 With that, the young guards tore through the house, smashing furniture, dumping shelves of books onto the floor, slashing priceless paintings by Lin Fengmian and Qi Baishi. On a rampage, the eager students looted the closets and drawers, tearing most of Nien Cheng’s clothing and linens. They overturned the bed mattresses and hacked them to pieces. Then they smashed her music recordings. Pressing on, they found the food pantry and dumped flour, sugar, and canned goods onto the ravaged clothing. They broke several bottles of red wine, pouring it over the mess.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.' Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that too. It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A DISPARU.

The Clintons’ last act before leaving the White House was to take stuff that didn’t belong to them. The Clintons took china, furniture, electronics, and art worth around $360,000. Hillary literally went through the rooms of the White House with an aide, pointing to things that she wanted taken down from shelves or out of cabinets or off the wall. By Clinton theft standards $360,000 is not a big sum, but it certainly underlines the couple’s insatiable greed—these people are not bound by conventional limits of propriety or decency. When the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee blew the whistle on this misappropriation, the Clintons first claimed that the stuff was given to them as gifts. Unfortunately for Hillary, gifts given to a president belong to the White House—they are not supposed to be spirited away by the first lady. The Clintons finally agreed to return $28,000 worth of gifts and reimburse the government $95,000, representing a fraction of the value of what they took. One valuable piece of art the Clintons attempted to steal was a Norman Rockwell painting showing the flame from Lady Liberty’s torch. Hillary had the painting taken from the Oval Office to the Clinton home in Chappaqua, but the Secret Service got wind of it and sent a car to Chappaqua to get it back. Hillary was outraged. Even here, though, the Clintons got the last laugh: they persuaded the Obama administration to let the Clinton Library have the painting, and there it hangs today. In Living History, Hillary put on a straight face and dismissed media reports about the topic. “The culture of investigation,” she wrote, “followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.”17

Katherine couldn’t have cared less about furniture or ceramics at that moment, but she felt glad that she was not the only one in London appalled by what the Lord Mayor had unleashed. She took a deep breath, then quickly explained what she and Bevis had heard in the Engineerium about MEDUSA and the next step in Crome’s great plan, the attack on the Shield-Wall. “But that’s terrible!” they whispered when she had finished. “Shan Guo is a great and ancient culture, Anti-Traction League or no Anti-Traction League. Batmunkh Gompa can’t be blown up …!” “Think of all those temples!” “Ceramics!” “Prayer-wheels …” “Silk paintings …” “F-f-furniture!” “Think of the people!” said Katherine angrily. “We must do something!” “Yes! Yes!” they agreed, and then all looked sheepishly at her. After twenty years of Crome’s rule they had no idea how to stand up to the Guild of Engineers. “But what can we do?” asked Pomeroy at last. “Tell people what is happening!” urged Katherine. “You’re Acting Head Historian. Call a meeting of the Council! Make them see how wrong it is!” Pomeroy shook his head. “They won’t listen, Miss Valentine. You heard the cheering last night.” “But that was only because Panzerstadt-Bayreuth had been going to eat us! When they learn that Crome plans to turn his weapon on yet another city …” “They’ll just cheer all the louder,” sighed Pomeroy. “He has packed the other Guilds with his allies, anyway,” observed Dr. Karuna. “All the great old Guildsmen are gone; dead or retired or arrested on his orders. Even our own apprentices are as besotted with old-tech as the Engineers, especially since Crome foisted his man Valentine on us as Head Historian…. Oh, I mean no offense, Miss Katherine….” “Father isn’t Crome’s man,” said Katherine angrily. “I’m sure he’s not! If he knew what Crome was planning he would never have helped him. That’s probably why he was packed off on this reconnaissance mission, to get him out of the way. When he gets home and finds out he’ll do something to stop it. You see, it was he who found MEDUSA in the first place. He would be horrified to think of it killing

After loud overtures from his daughters, Anthony finally left the house and went up the winding path to the “museum,” to the mobile home where he and his parents had lived from 1949 to 1958. It has been left untouched. The furniture, tables, the paint on the walls, the ’50s cabinets, the dressers, the closets, are all unchanged, remaining as they once were. And in her closet in the bedroom, past the nurse’s uniform, far away in the right-hand corner on the top shelf, lies the black backpack that contains Tatiana’s soul. Every once in a while when she can stand it—or when she can’t stand it—she looks through it. Alexander never looks through it. Tatiana knows what Anthony is about to see. Two cans of Spam in the pack. A bottle of vodka. The nurse’s uniform she escaped from the Soviet Union in that hangs in plastic in the museum closet, next to the PMH nurse’s uniform she nearly lost her marriage in. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal in the pack, in a hidden pocket. The letters she received from Alexander—including the last one from Kontum, which, when she heard about his injuries, she thought would be the last one. That plane ride to Saigon in December 1970 was the longest twelve hours of Tatiana’s life. Francesca and her daughter Emily took care of Tatiana’s kids. Vikki, her good and forgiven friend, came with her, to bring back the body of Tom Richter, to bring back Anthony. In the backpack lies an old yellowed book, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. The pages are so old, they splinter if you turn them. You cannot leaf, you can only lift. And between the fracturing pages, photographs are slotted like fragile parchment leaves. Anthony is supposed to find two of these photographs and bring them back. It should take him only a few minutes. Cracked leaves of Tania before she was Alexander’s. Here she is at a few months old, held by her mother, Tania in one arm, Pasha in the other. Here she is, a toddler in the River Luga, bobbing with Pasha. And here a few years older, lying in the hammock with Dasha. A beaming, pretty, dark-haired Dasha is about fourteen. Here is Tania, around ten, with two dangling little braids, doing a fantastic one-armed handstand on top of a tree stump. Here are Tania and Pasha in the boat together, Pasha threateningly raising the oar over her head. Here is the whole family. The parents, side by side, unsmiling, Deda holding Tania’s hand. Babushka holding Pasha’s, Dasha smiling merrily in front.

So,” I cleared my throat, unable to tolerate his moans of pleasure and praise any longer, “uh, what are your plans for the weekend?” “The weekend?” He sounded a bit dazed. “Yes. This weekend. What do you have planned? Planning on busting up any parties?” I asked lightly, not wanting him to know that I was unaccountably breathless. I moved to his other knee and discarded the towel. “Ha. No. Not unless those wankers down the hall give me a reason to.” Removing his arms from his face, Bryan’s voice was thick, gravelly as he responded, “I, uh, have some furniture to assemble.” “Really?” Surprised, I stilled and stared at the line of his jaw. The creases around his mouth—when he held perfectly still—made him look mature and distinguished. Actually, they made him even more classically handsome, if that was even possible. “Yes. Really. Two IKEA bookshelves.” I slid my hands lower, behind his ankle, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I prompted, “That’s it?” “No.” He sighed, hesitated, then added, “I need to stop by the hardware store. The tap in my bathroom is leaking and one of the drawer handles in the kitchen is missing a screw. I just repainted the guest room, so I have to take the excess paint cans to the chemical disposal place; it’s only open on Saturdays before noon. And then I promised my mam I’d take her to dinner.” My mouth parted slightly because the oddest thing happened as he rattled off his list of chores. It turned me on. Even more so than running my palms over his luscious legs. That’s right. His list of adult tasks made my heart flutter. I rolled my lips between my teeth, not wanting to blurt that I also needed to go to the hardware store over the weekend. As a treat to myself, I was planning to organize Patrick’s closet and wanted to install shelves above the clothes rack. Truly, Sean’s penchant for buying my son designer suits and ties was completely out of hand. Without some reorganization, I would run out of space. That’s right. Organizing closets was something I loved to do. I couldn’t get enough of those home and garden shows, especially Tiny Houses, because I adored clever uses for small spaces. I was just freaky enough to admit my passion for storage and organization. But back to Bryan and his moans of pleasure, adult chores, and luscious legs. I would not think about Bryan Leech adulting. I would not think about him walking into the hardware store in his sensible shoes and plain gray T-shirt—that would of course pull tightly over his impressive pectoral muscles—and then peruse the aisles for . . . a screw. I. Would. Not. Ignoring the spark of kinship, I set to work on his knee, again counting to distract myself. It worked until he volunteered, “I’d like to install some shelves in my closet, but that’ll have to wait until next weekend. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off. I’d do just about anything to get someone to help me organize my closet.” He chuckled. I’d like to organize your closet. I fought a groan, biting my lip as I removed my hands, turned from his body, and rinsed them under the faucet. “We’re, uh, finished for today.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

Cass retreated into a corner, hiding behind a sculpture of Venus where Madalena wouldn't see her, and where she and Falco could converse in relative privacy. When Falco got closer, they both opened their mouths to speak at once. When Falco got closer, they both opened their mouths to speak at once. “Your twin, I presume?” Falco said, gesturing toward the Venus. Cass realized she and the sculpture both had their arms folded across their midsection. She dropped her hands to her side. “I just--” “Come with me.” Falco didn’t wait for her to answer. He placed his hand on the small of her back as if he were merely helping her navigate the crowded portego. Once he hit the hallway at the back of the room, he twined his fingers through hers and whisked her into a small study, latching the door behind them. The walls of the room were painted dark gray and the furniture was made of a sturdy mahogany. He turned to her. “Now, at least, we can speak in private.” Cass’s whole body felt simultaneously shivery and warm, as it always did when she and Falco were alone together.

My bedroom looked very different the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It looked lonely. I opened my eyes just as the sun started creeping through the window, and I stared at the white chest of drawers that had greeted me every morning since I could remember. Maybe it’s stupid to think that a piece of furniture had feelings, but then again, I’m the same girl who kept my tattered old baby doll dressed in a sweater and knitted cap so she wouldn’t get cold sitting on the top shelf of my closet. And this morning that chest of drawers was looking sad. All the photographs and trophies and silly knickknacks that had blanketed the top and told my life story better than any words ever could were gone, packed in brown cardboard boxes and neatly stacked in the cellar. Even my pretty pink walls were bare. Mama picked that color after I was born, and I’ve never wanted to change it. Ruthis Morgan used to try to convince me that my walls should be painted some other color. ‘Pink’s just not your color, Catherine Grace. You know as well as I do that there’s not a speck of pink on the football field.’ There was nothing she could say that was going to change my mind of the color on my walls. If I had I would have lost another piece of my mama. And I wasn’t letting go of any piece of her, pink or not. Daddy insisted on replacing my tired, worn curtains a while back, but I threw such a fit that he spent a good seven weeks looking for the very same fabric, little bitsy pink flowers on a white -and-pink-checkered background. He finally found a few yards in some textile mill down in South Carolina. I told him there were a few things in life that should never be allowed to change, and my curtains were one of them. So many other things were never going to stay the same, and this morning was one of them. I’d been praying for this day for as long as I could remember, and now that it was here, all I wanted to do was crawl under my covers and pretend it was any other day. . . . I know that this would be the last morning I would wake up in this bed as a Sunday-school-going, dishwashing, tomato-watering member of this family. I knew this would be the last morning I would wake up in the same bed where I had calculated God only knows how many algebra problems, the same bed I had hid under playing hide-and-seek with Martha Ann, and the same bed I had lain on and cried myself to sleep too many nights after Mama died. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day considering I was having such a hard time just saying good-bye to my bed.

Contrary to popular opinion, a home is not an asset for creating real wealth, it is a liability.22 Your home does not generate any income; it is a Money Pit. You have to pay the mortgage, utilities, maintenance, property taxes that continue to go up each year, and, insurance that tends to also increase annually. After so many years, kitchens need remodeling, carpets & flooring replaced, and, painting and decorating requiring new furniture to match the updated changes. And, the larger the home the more furniture that is needed to fill it up.

Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.

Hildi surprises her homeowners by spray-painting the existing upholstered furniture magenta. Later one of Hildi's homowners brings Paige in with her eyes closed and then reveals the painted furniture. Paige is shocked and says, "This looks pretty bad." Hildi arrives on Day 2 to find that the tarp blew off the freshly painted furniture; the furniture has been rained on and ruined. Paige eventually agrees to break the rules, letting Hildi go severely over budget in order to buy new furniture. Hildi leaves and returnes with two new slipcovered sofas (total cost: $500). (Season 2, Episode 23)

Edward gets funky in Beverly Mitchell's (and Jessica Biel's) garage rec room by painting the walls gray, building room screens that are painted gray and chartreuse, upholstering thrift store and existing furniture... Hildi brings a little refinement to George and Jeff Stolt'z bachelor pad living room... (Season 3, Episode 52)

Fiona had spent months choosing furniture, spent years buying and even paying off paintings that she’d found, deliberated greatly over the frames she’d buy to put her family’s photos in. The blinds… The crockery… The… the… The nerve!

Isaiah knew houses like this existed but he’d never been inside one. The sheer quantity of overstuffed furniture, marble flooring, life-size paintings, exotic statuary, burnished woods, heavy drapery, and gilded mirrors made the house feel like a furniture store after everyone had gone home. “I

Her flat looked like a mess –a coloring mess. Once you enter it, you can feel like a person had eaten all the colors and paints and brushes in the whole world and threw up there. But somehow when you enter it, you wouldn’t feel the urge to throw up, actually, the colors mixed with furniture too well, the masterpieces were drawn perfectly that you feel like you are standing in an art museum.

It is pretty clear, then, that attention can control the brain’s sensory processing. But it can do something else, too, something that we only hinted at in our discussion of neuroplasticity. It is a commonplace observation that our perceptions and actions do not take place in a vacuum. Rather, they occur on a stage set that has been concocted from the furniture of our minds. If your mind has been primed with the theory of pointillism (the use of tiny dots of primary colors to generate secondary colors), then you will see a Seurat painting in a very different way than if you are ignorant of his technique. Yet the photons of light reflecting off the Seurat and impinging on your retina, there to be conveyed as electrical impulses into your visual cortex, are identical to the photons striking the retina of a less knowledgeable viewer, as well as of one whose mind is distracted. The three viewers “see” very different paintings. Information reaches the brain from the outside world, yes—but in “an ever-changing context of internal representations,” as Mike Merzenich put it. Mental states matter. Every stimulus from the world outside impinges on a consciousness that is predisposed to accept it, or to ignore it. We can therefore go further: not only do mental states matter to the physical activity of the brain, but they can contribute to the final perception even more powerfully than the stimulus itself. Neuroscientists are (sometimes reluctantly) admitting mental states into their models for a simple reason: the induction of cortical plasticity discussed in the previous chapters is no more the simple and direct product of particular cortical stimuli than the perception of the Seurat painting is unequivocally determined by the objective pattern of photons emitted from its oil colors: quite the contrary.

....she wondered whether they mightn’t better let the mortgage wait a little. Before they were worn out, before their best years were gone. It was something of life she wanted, not just a house and furniture; something of John, not pretty clothes when she would be too old to wear them. But John of course couldn’t understand. To him it seemed only right that she should have the pretty clothes—only right that he, fit for nothing else, should slave away fifteen hours a day to give them to her. There was in his devotion a baffling, insurmountable humility that made him feel the need of sacrifice. And when his muscles ached, when his feet dragged stolidly with weariness, then it seemed that in some measure at least he was making amends for his big hulking body and simple mind. (...) To him it was not what he actually accomplished by means of the sacrifice that mattered, but the sacrifice itself, the gesture - something done for her sake. And she, understanding, kept her silence.

You know, the old Nesfield is going. It won't survive the coming war. And I for one shan't mourn it. A nasty rabbit-warren of a place. … And we shall have a sort of dog-kennel civilisation instead. Every man, every family-unit in a nice drudgery-proof kennel with plenty of bright paint and a good high fence around. Do you ever look at the book-stalls? All those magazines about homes and gardens and refrigerators and furniture-polish? It's not a dream world, like the cinema. It's a world on the verge of becoming real. And to my way of thinking, not a bad thing. But desperately insulating and unsociable. The rabbit-warren is at least a shoulder-rubbing sort of place, and that breeds communal feeling, ideas, discontents – the things that make the individual life get somewhere.

...the woman's grief painted the walls and floors an oily black. Her pain had gathered here, among the knick-knacks and clay plates, quilted blankets with frayed edges and tired furniture.

One breath, the study was intact. The next, it was shards of nothing, a shell of a room. None of it had touched me from where I had dropped to the floor, my hands over my head. Tamlin was panting, the ragged breaths almost like sobs. I was shaking- shaking so hard I thought my bones would splinter as the furniture had- but I made myself lower my arms and look at him. That was devastation on that face. And pain. And fear. And grief. Around me, no debris had fallen- as if he had shielded me. Tamlin took a step toward me, over that invisible demarcation. He recoiled as if he'd hit something solid. 'Feyre,,' he rasped. He stepped again- and that line held. 'Feyre, please,' he breathed. And I realised that the line, that bubble of protection... It was from me. A shield. Not just a mental one- but a physical one, too. ... 'Feyre,' Tamlin groaned a third time, pushing a hand against what indeed looked like an invisible, curved wall of hardened air. 'Please. Please.' Those words cracked something in me. Cracked me open. Perhaps they cracked that shield of solid wind as well, for his hand shot through it. Then he stepped over that line between chaos and order, danger and safety. He dropped to his knees, taking my face in his hands. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' I couldn't stop trembling. 'I'll try,' he breathed. 'I'll try to be better. I don't... I can't control it sometimes. The rage. Today was just... today was bad. With the Tithe, with all of it. Today- let's forget it, let's just move past it. Please.' I didn't fight as he slid his arms around me, tucking me in tightly enough that his warmth soaked through me. He buried his face in my neck and said onto my nape, as if the words would be absorbed by my body, as if he could only say it the way we'd always been good at communicating- skin to skin, 'I couldn't save you before. I couldn't protect you from them. And when you said that, about... about me drowning you... Am I any better than they were?' I should have told him it wasn't true, but... I had spoken with my heart. Or what was left of it. 'I'll try to be better,' he said again. 'Please- give me more time. Let me... let me get through this. Please.' Get through what? I wanted to ask. But words had abandoned me. I realised I hadn't spoken yet. Realised he was waiting for an answer- and that I didn't have one. So I put my arms around him, because body to body was the only way I could speak, too. It was answer enough. 'I'm sorry,' he said again. He didn't stop murmuring it for minutes. You've given enough, Feyre. Perhaps he was right. And perhaps I didn't have anything left to give, anyway. I looked over his shoulder as I held him. The red paint had splattered on the wall behind us. And as I watched it slide down the cracked wood panelling, I thought it looked like blood.

Tamlin- Tamlin, I can't... I can't live my life with guards around me day and night. I can't live like that... suffocation. Just let me help you- let me work with you.' 'You've given enough, Feyre.' 'I know. But...' I faced him. Met his stare- the full power of the High Lord of the Spring Court. 'I'm harder to kill now. I'm faster, stronger-' 'My family were faster and stronger than you. And they were murdered quite easily.' 'Then marry someone who can put up with this.' He blinked. Slowly. Then he said with terrible softness. 'Do you not want to marry me, then?' I tried not to look at the ring on my finger, at the emerald. 'Of course I do. Of course I do.' My voice broke. 'But you... Tamlin...' The walls pushed in on me. The quiet, the guards, the stares. What I'd seen at the Tithe today. 'I'm drowning,' I managed to say. 'I am drowning. And the more you do this, the more guards... You might as well be shoving my head under the water.' Nothing in those eyes, that face. But then- I cried out, instinct taking over as his power blasted through the room. The windows shattered. The furniture splintered. And that box of paints and brushes and paper... It exploded into dust and glass and wood.

What does kaheerakah mean?” “Caťaoireaca. It’s Irish for chairs.” “Chairs? You toast furniture in Ireland?” Bridget laughed. “There’s a story. Probably apocryphal…” I made a rolling motion with my hand. “Okay, but remember, you asked.” She settled herself and poured another glass of paint thinner. “There was this Brit who decided to stop at Hotel Rosslare in County Wexford. He had a few, then a few more, then he decided to be friendly. So he asked the barmaid how you say ‘cheers’ in Irish.” Bridget smiled wickedly. “And you know how the Brits massacre the English language, so she thought he said ‘chairs’, and she told him. Whereupon he bought a round for the house, turned to the other patrons, raised his glass, and said Caťaoireaca.

I have difficulty imagining what trouble the High King got into in his own rooms, but it doesn't take me long to discover. When we arrive, I spot Cardan resting among the wreckage of his furniture. Curtains ripped from their rods, the frames of paintings cracked, their canvases kicked through, furniture broken. A small fire smoulders in a corner, and everything stinks of smoke and spilled wine. Nor is he alone. On a nearby couch are Locke and two beautiful faeries- a boy and a girl- one with ram's horns, the other with long ears that come to tufted points, like those of an owl. All of them are in an advanced state of undress and inebriation. They watch the room burn with a kind of grim fascination. ... 'Carda-' I remember myself and sink in to a bow. 'Your Infernal Majesty.' He turns and, for a moment, seems to look through me, as though he has no idea who I am. His mouth is painted gold, and his pupils are large with intoxication. Then his lip lifts in a familiar sneer. 'You.' 'Yes,' I say. 'Me.

When I stopped overeating, I became conscious of my environment.” Some of us declutter, some of us paint, some of us move our furniture. All of us experience the phenomenon that Clean Eating leads to cleaner living.

And the rest of the house, do you like it?” When she doesn’t answer right away, I continue. “You can change anything you want. Furniture. Paint,” I shrug. “We can gut the whole place or just buy something new.

Latitude Back then I was committed to the color blue, felt moved to paint my walls, nails, furniture the same shade of teal. Now my body swells at the window with casual longing. Do you believe in saltwater gargling. As a cure. At the gas station I felt proud to specify it was the navy lighter we wanted. Often the bravest thing I do all day is open my mouth. On every beach washes up the memory of some other beach when I didn’t evaluate my own body. Last night Orion’s Belt filled me with dread because everyone I have shown it to has exited my life with no warning. Still, I couldn’t help myself. The light was brief and obvious.

looked more like one of those co-working hangouts that urban hipsters liked than an actual police station. It had annoyed the boys and girls in blue who had taken pride in their moldy, crumbling bunker with its flickering fluorescent lights and carpet stained from decades of criminals. Their annoyance at the bright paint and slick new office furniture was the only thing I didn’t hate about it. The Knockemout PD did their best to rediscover their roots, piling precious towers of case folders on top of adjustable-height bamboo desks and brewing too cheap, too strong coffee 24/7. There was a box of stale donuts open on the counter and powdered sugar fingerprints everywhere. But so far nothing had taken the shine off the newness of the fucking Knox Morgan Building. Sergeant Grave Hopper was behind his desk stirring half a pound of sugar into his coffee. A reformed motorcycle club member, he now spent his weeknights coaching his daughter’s softball team and his weekends mowing lawns. His and his mother-in-law’s. But once a year, he’d pack up his wife on the back of his bike, and off they’d go to relive their glory days on the open road. He spotted me and my guest and nearly upended the entire mug all over himself. “What’s goin’ on, Knox?” Grave asked, now

jacket that gives you a little hug when someone likes your Facebook post; a paintbrush that samples any color or pattern you tap the brush on and turns it into digital paint; tables that listen, furniture that melts into the floor or into the wall when it’s not needed; lights that understand your activity and adjust their intensity and focus appropriately; watches that help students meet other people like them and prompt face-to-face conversation; E Ink Post-it notes that dynamically update to show place-based messages; a key fob that displays the traffic situation on your commute ahead.

Thinking quickly, Debroeck moved to protect the crime scene from contamination: the Belgian police force trains its officers well. Lucie, for her part, tried to look past the corpses and made a mental grid of the surroundings. Open drawers, furniture tipped over. She noted the presence of a smashed wall safe. The frame of the painting that had hidden it lay shattered on the floor. “First, they keep Luc Szpilman from helping with the composite sketch, and second, they make off with anything that can compromise them.” “What could have compromised them?” “The discoveries his father had surely made about the anonymous film. The documents he might have exchanged with the Canadian informant. They came to do some housecleaning. God dammit!

Inside it looks like a nineteenth century palace, given the attention to detail and the elegance of the furniture: there are two carpets on the floor, more paintings in gilt frames, wooden furniture along the walls, and a large table with a flower arrangement in the center. All lit with spotlights. Andrea feels like he’s in another era and another season; it doesn’t look like a home in the mountains and there's no summer heat. He expects some nobility to appear. Indeed, standing next to the table is Ian. And he’s watching them. Andrea gasps silently. "Here we are," says Carlotta. "We’re very sorry for making you wait, Count." "Don’t worry, Carlotta," he says politely, moving closer. Ian’s wearing a white top with a black satin jacket and pants, also satin, with a stripe down the side. It creates a strange Casual Count effect that both stuns and disturbs Andrea. Always ambiguous, Ian doesn’t seem to want to adapt to anything. Not even a normal style. Was he not sure whether to go for a stroll or to a party? Andrea feels his brain smoking so much that it must be on fire. "These inconveniences can happen." He smiles at her and she blushes to the point of melting. Her knees buckle and she touches her face, embarrassed. Typical! Andrea grunts. "Can you introduce your friend to me?" says Ian. "Of course. He’s the guy.....," she stops. "Nearest to our Maicol." Ian looks at him and pretends not to know him. Andrea does the same. "Exactly," says Carlotta.

Despite the power of the office, the waiting room was done up in Early American Dentist. The carpet was threadbare. The furniture managed to be neither fashionable nor functional. There were a dozen different issues of Sports Illustrated on the table and nothing else. The walls seemed to plead for a paint job. They were stained and barren, except for the photographs of past U.S. attorneys, a remarkable lesson in what not to wear and how not to pose when taking a picture for posterity. No

Meredith Etherington-Smith Meredith Etherington-Smith became an editor of Paris Vogue in London and GQ magazine in the United States during the 1970s. During the 1980s, she served as deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen magazine and has since become a leading art critic. Currently, she is editor in chief of Christie’s magazine. She is also a noted artist biographer; her book on Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, was an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. Her drawing room that morning was much like any comfortable, slightly formal drawing room to be found in country houses throughout England: the paintings, hung on pale yellow walls, were better; the furniture, chintz-covered; the flowers, natural garden bouquets. It was charming. And so was she, as she swooped in from a room beyond. I had never seen pictures of her without any makeup, with just-washed hair and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. She looked more vital, more beautiful, than any photograph had ever managed to convey. She was, in a word, staggering; here was the most famous woman in the world up close, relaxed, funny, and warm. The tragic Diana, the royal Diana, the wronged Diana: a clever, interesting person who wasn’t afraid to say she didn’t know how an auction sale worked, and would it be possible to work with me on it? “Of course, ma’am,” I said. “It’s your sale, and if you would like, then we’ll work on it together to make the most money we can for your charities.” “So what do we do next?” she asked me. “First, I think you had better choose the clothes for sale.” The next time I saw her drawing room, Paul Burrell, her butler, had wheeled in rack after rack of jeweled, sequined, embroidered, and lacy dresses, almost all of which I recognized from photographs of the Princess at some state event or gala evening. The visible relics of a royal life that had ended. The Princess, in another pair of immaculately pressed jeans and a stripy shirt, looked so different from these formal meringues that it was almost laughable. I think at that point the germ of an idea entered my mind: that sometime, when I had gotten to know her better and she trusted me, I would like to see photographs of the “new” Princess Diana--a modern woman unencumbered by the protocol of royal dress. Eventually, this idea led to putting together the suite of pictures of this sea-change princess with Mario Testino. I didn’t want her to wear jewels; I wanted virtually no makeup and completely natural hair. “But Meredith, I always have people do my hair and makeup,” she explained. “Yes ma’am, but I think it is time for a change--I want Mario to capture your speed, and electricity, the real you and not the Princess.” She laughed and agreed, but she did turn up at the historic shoot laden with her turquoise leather jewel boxes. We never opened them. Hair and makeup took ten minutes, and she came out of the dressing room looking breathtaking. The pictures are famous now; they caused a sensation at the time. My favorite memory of Princess Diana is when I brought the work prints round to Kensington Palace for her to look at. She was so keen to see them that she raced down the stairs and grabbed them. She went silent for a moment or two as she looked at these vivid, radiant images. Then she turned to me and said, “But these are really me. I’ve been set free and these show it. Don’t you think,” she asked me, “that I look a bit like Marilyn Monroe in some of them?” And laughed.

Let me show you something.” Baird caught him by the arm and stopped his frantic pacing. “What?” Reluctantly, Sylvan allowed himself to be dragged down the hallway to the far bedroom. “What is it?” “This.” Baird threw open the door to the room and pulled Sylvan in. “What?” Sylvan asked again. “Look,” Baird said quietly. “Just look.” Taking a deep breath, Sylvan forced himself to do as his half brother asked. The room had one long window with no shades on it. Sunshine poured through it in a brilliant flood. There was no furniture anywhere—just an artist’s easel in the center of the room. Finished and half-finished canvases were stacked against the walls. “Paintings,” Sylvan said, frowning. “Yes, Sophia’s an artist. She told me so.” “Look,” Baird said again. “All these paintings are of you, Brother.” Sylvan looked around in wonder. It was true—from every painting and canvas, he saw a piece of himself. Ice blue eyes, blond hair, stern mouth…Does she really see me this way? “She told me she had painted me,” he said aloud, still looking. “And I saw it in a dream, too. I just didn’t know she’d done so many.” “There’s enough to fill a museum in here.” Baird sounded amused. “The Sylvan Vii museum of fine art. We could sell tickets.” “Very funny,” Sylvan said sourly. “I don’t see your point.” “The point is that the female who painted these pictures, cares for you,” Baird said earnestly. “Cares very much, I believe. And I can see you care for her as well. Just give her time to collect herself and tell her so, Sylvan. Apologize for frightening her and declare your love. Then when you get back to the ship, go to the sacred grove and ask to be released of your vow.” “I’m

looked around, trying to imagine what it’d be like to work there. The furniture was trendy but functional, and plants gave the area a personal touch. The walls were painted a warm off-white, and they were decorated with framed ads that Elle recognized immediately. Geometric-patterned rugs covered much of the floor. Taken individually, none of it was really her

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave.

This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent half their lives just trying to hold it together.

Writing a novel is like building a house. The rough draft is the foundation and frame work. The rewrites are like putting in the utilities, drywall, flooring and fixtures. The final draft is like painting and putting your furniture in. You look at what you have built and feel accomplished.

She wore cosmetics tonight, more than he had ever seen on her before. Perhaps she had, in the past, dusted her nose with rice powder, but he had never seen her wear rouge. Indeed, when he bent over her hand in salutation, he caught a whiff of the beet juice used to color the powder for cheeks and lard for lips. Her smile was small and halted rather abruptly. Pain flashed through her eyes, though it was quickly doused. His gaze focused on her right cheek again. Was it swollen? Without question—and the rouge did not quite cover an edge of bruising. As the rest of the party moved to the furniture, a few of the knots smoothed out within him, though a couple of different ones took up residence. He did not release her hand. “Would you take a turn about the room with me, Miss Reeves?” “Very well, sir.” She sounded far from enthusiastic and moved to his right side. Undoubtedly so that hers was turned away from him. “I trust you passed a pleasant afternoon?” He kept his gaze upon her as he led her to the edge of the chamber so that they might walk its perimeter as far from their families as possible. In a low voice he said, “More pleasant than yours, from the looks of it. What is wrong with your cheek, Miss Reeves?” She turned wide eyes on him, filled with outrage and a grain of amusement. “Mr. Lane, perhaps you are yet unaccustomed to seeing ladies wearing paint, but I assure you, ’tis the height of fashion. I resent being told it looks wrong.” He may have been tempted to smile, had it not been a matter of her welfare. “It is not the rouge to which I refer, Miss Reeves, as you well know.” “In which case I have no idea…

On Monday mornings in nice weather, Diana would ask, “Where did you go this weekend, Mrs. Robertson?” She knew we made frequent trips outside London. Other English friends would tell us about their favorite spots, but Diana was not forthcoming with travel suggestions. At the time, I assumed that she might not have seen as much of England and Scotland as we did during that year. Diana enjoyed our enthusiasm for her country--its natural beauty, its stately homes and castles, its history. She must have smiled inside when I would tell her of my pleasure in the architecture, paintings, and furniture I saw in England’s famous mansions. She’d grown up in one! And she would always ask, “How did Patrick enjoy…Warwick Castle or Canterbury Cathedral or Dartmoor?” Patrick was a very good-natured sightseer. In return, I would ask, “And how was your weekend?”, leaving it up to her to say as little or as much as she chose. I would not have asked specifically, “What did you do last weekend?” She would answer politely and briefly, “Fine,” or “Lovely,” maybe mentioning that she’d been out in the country. Of course, I didn’t know “the country” meant a huge estate that had been in the family for centuries. Diana was unfailingly polite but sparing of any details. She considered her personal life just that, personal. She was careful never to give us a clue about her background. If she did not volunteer information, something in her manner told me I should not intrude. She may not have even been aware of this perception I had. I viewed her understated manner as appealing and discreet, not as off-putting or unfriendly. Clearly, Diana did not want us to know who she was. We may possibly have been the only people Diana ever knew who had no idea who she was. We welcomed her into our home and trusted her with our child for what she was. This may have been one reason she stayed in touch with us over the years.

Early Trans-Atlantic Voyages "Since Columbus’ discovery of the islands in the Caribbean, the number of Spanish ships that ventured west across the Atlantic had consistently increased. For reasons of safety in numbers, the ships usually made the transit in convoys, carrying nobility, public servants and conquistadors on the larger galleons that had a crew of 180 to 200. On these ships a total of 40 to 50 passengers had their own cabins amidships. These ships carried paintings, finished furniture, fabric and, of course, gold on the return trip. The smaller vessels including the popular caravels had a crew of only 30, but carried as many people as they could fit in the cargo holds. Normally they would carry about 100 lesser public servants, soldiers, and settlers, along with farm animals and equipment, seeds, plant cuttings and diverse manufactured goods.

The first night, while I stayed over in the office, Cossacks had come to our house, in the middle of the night, and poked with bayonets into the beds; made crippled Mrs. Kreisdel stand up to see whether she was fit for military service, then left. We had a storage closet, for winter clothes. It had a door, which was painted the same as the walls. A piece of furniture stood in front of it. We decided to leave the door accessible and if anybody knocked at the door at night, I would hide in the closet and the dressing table, with its high mirror would be put in place. However, the situation deteriorated drastically for every able-bodied person.

The infamous Fray Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres, who had sniveled around the Royal Court wanting to become a favorite of the pious Queen Isabella, was appointed Governor of the Indies, replacing Francisco de Bobadilla, the man who had been responsible for sending Columbus from Hispaniola, back to Spain in irons. Prior to his appointment Fray Nicolás de Ovando had been a Spanish soldier, coming from a noble family, and was a Knight of the Order of Alcántara. On February 13, 1502, Fray Nicolás sailed from Spain with a record breaking fleet of thirty ships. Since Columbus’ discovery of the islands in the Caribbean, the number of Spanish ships that ventured west across the Atlantic had consistently increased. For reasons of safety in numbers, the ships usually made the transit in convoys, carrying nobility, public servants and conquistadors on the larger galleons that had a crew of 180 to 200. On these ships a total of 40 to 50 passengers had their own cabins midship. These ships carried paintings, finished furniture, fabric and, of course, gold on the return trip. The smaller vessels including the popular caravels had a crew of only 30, but carried as many people as they could fit in the cargo holds. Normally they would carry about 100 lesser public servants, soldiers, and settlers, along with farm animals and equipment, seeds, plant cuttings and diverse manufactured goods. For those that went before, European goods reminded them of home and were in great demand. Normally the ships would sail south along the sandy coast of the Sahara until they reached the Canary Islands, where they would stop for potable water and provisions before heading west with the trade winds. Even on a good voyage, they could count on burying a third of these adventurous at sea. Life was harsh and six to eight weeks out of sight of land, always took its toll! In all it is estimated that 30,500 colonists made that treacherous voyage over time. Most of them had been intentionally selected to promote Spanish interests and culture in the New World. Queen Isabella wanted to introduce Christianity into the West Indies, improve the islands economically and proliferate the Spanish and Christian influences in the region.