Oval Portrait Quotes

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

—I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

I picked up my volume of Collected Stories and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe.  I sprawled across the bed and flipped through the pages until I came to one of my favorite short stories: “The Oval Portrait.

ROOSEVELT’S SUDDEN INTEREST in modern art, on a day when he could have stayed home and read accounts of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, caused much editorial hilarity. A cartoon by Kemble90 in the Baltimore Evening Sun showed the new President contemplating a portrait of his toothy predecessor in the Oval Office and musing, “I wonder if that’s a futurist? It can’t be a cubist.” The New York World argued that the “Square Deal”91 of 1903 had been a proto-Cubist conceit, doing to the Constitution what Braque and Picasso would do to color and form ten years later.

The girl enters the room wearing work boots, torn jeans, and a gray long-sleeved T-shirt bearing the word PRINCETON. She is waif-thin, with a long neck, prominent cheekbones, and narrow eyes spread apart in a way that suggests eastern Europe. Her hair is in one of those styles I’ve never understood, the right side of her head shaved in a military buzz cut with  longer hair hanging over it, down to her bony shoulders. A cross between a Calvin Klein model and a Eurotrash punk rocker. She scans the room, but not the way most people who enter the Oval Office do. First-time visitors soak it all in, eagerly devour all the portraits and knickknacks, marvel at the presidential seal, the Resolute desk. Not her. What I see in her eyes, behind the impenetrable wall of her face, is pure loathing. Hatred of me, this office, everything it stands for. But she’s tense, too, on alert—wondering if someone will jump her, handcuff her, throw a hood over her head.

If you are Pakistani or Indian you might just as well commit suicide when the team is humiliated; if you’re West Indian, you might feel the world has fallen apart when things go wrong at the Oval. But these are countries where cricket is one of the leading suppliers of national pride. In England, you don’t support cricket teams, you follow them. It’s the game you support, not the team.

Considering the causes that led to the death of my friend Désormeaux, and the circumstances of that death, I cannot help experiencing, modest as I am, a very legitimate pride. Never was a wisely-conceived project put into action with more security, or procured a more profound joy to the perpetrator. To tell the truth, I had wanted to kill Désormeaux for a long time. His existence had become incompatible with mine. I was used to the ingratitude of men, but that of my friend Désormeaux was something so monstrous that it exceeded the extraordinary. For several years I admired that special case, and came to cultivate it curiously, incessantly giving the wretch new opportunities to prove that radiant ingratitude to me. I furnished him with benefits, as a sumptuous king heaps gold upon the artist of genius whose works magnify him, but it was only gradually that I tasted the full savor of his inverted gratitude.

She is about to close the book and return it to the desk when she catches sight of a face passing on the flickering pages. She leafs her way back until she finds it again- not an entire face, but a section; an eye, the sweep of a cheekbone, the curved line of a neck observed from side-on; all illustrated as if seen in the reflection of a small, oval mirror. A car-wing mirror. She peers at the page more closely, breath held in her chest as the moment returns to her: sitting in Charles's new car, Jack scrunched in the back and Lillian in the front, a peacock barring their path. It is exactly how he would have seen her reflected back at him in the wing-mirror. As with the other drawings, the accuracy is remarkable. She is amazed at his ability to recall the smallest details. There is the pearl stud at her earlobe and the almost indiscernible beauty spot above her lip. Yet the more closely she studies the sketch, the more she is discomforted. It isn't just the precision of the pencil lines conjuring her on the paper- butt more the expression he has captured- a certain wistfulness she hadn't known she wore so plainly. The portrait feels so intimate; almost as if he had laid her bare on the page. She continues to leaf through the sketches and finds a second portrait. This time she is seated in the drawing room, her face turned to the window, the skirt of her dress falling in a fan to to the floor. A third reveals her standing on the terrace, leaning against the balustrade, a long evening dress sweeping about her legs. The night of the party. The next page shows just her arm, identifiable by a favorite diamond bracelet dangling at the wrist. The last is of her head and shoulders, viewed from behind, the curves of her neck rising up to a twisted knot of hair. Looking at the images she isn't sure how she feels; flattered to be seen, to be deemed worthy of his time and attention, though at the same time a little uncomfortable at the intimacy of his gaze and at the thought of having been so scrutinized when she hadn't even known he was watching her.

What did it show of me? A long oval face, with features that were too delicate-a nose too narrow, eyes round with round eyebrows and a full cupid’s bow mouth that made me look as if I were a twelve-year-old girl. No huge eyes, no high cheekbones, no rugged jaw. Just very pretty, yes, too pretty, which is why I’d scowled for most of the photographs taken for the portrait; but the artist hadn’t saved that scowl into the face.

We’ve brought you a present, dear.’ ‘Really?’ ‘It’s just for you.’ It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting. ‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says. ‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire. ‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars. ‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod. Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them. They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.

Then, with great relish, Lyndon Johnson spun a Texas tale. It was his pièce de résistance, the crescendo of an expansive, four-hour performance. “When I got [Kennedy] in the Oval Office,” Johnson began, “and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the Vice President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” For effect, the president gulped, audibly, at the reporters. He mimicked Bobby’s “funny voice” and proceeded to tell, in lavish detail and with evident delight, his version of the meeting. Finally, LBJ ran down a list of possible running mates and explained the ways each would hurt his chances. “In other words,” recalled Folliard, “he would do better in the November election if he had no running mate. This left Wicker, Kiker and me baffled—and that is just what the man evidently wanted us to be.” Within days Johnson’s story was the talk of Washington. His portrait of RFK as a “stunned semi-idiot” left columnist Joseph Alsop and other Washington insiders feeling rather stunned themselves. It was not long before the gossip found its way to Bobby Kennedy, who stormed back to the White House and accused the president of mistruths and a violation of trust. I knew the meeting was taped, he said, but I never expected this. Wasn’t our talk a matter of confidence? Aren’t we honorable men? LBJ was unrepentant: I’ve revealed nothing, he assured Kennedy, gesturing wanly at an empty page in his appointment book. He promised to check his notes for any conversations that might have slipped his mind. Bobby stalked out, seething, and caught a plane to Hyannis Port. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said of Johnson the next week, echoing the words of George Reedy, “that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

The Lamar Life stationary carried on its letterhead an oval portrait of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, for whom the Company had been named: a Mississippian who had been a member of Congress, Secretary of the Interior under Cleveland, and a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a powerful orator who had pressed for the better reconciliation of North and South after the Civil War.

--Birthday Star Atlas-- "Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our nightly stroll the color of silence and time.

Elizabethan portrait miniature. Usually oval in shape, these tiny paintings were designed to be worn on hats, doublets, or chains often as feudal badges of loyalty. Soldiers sent back miniature ambassadors of themselves to their wives or mistresses so as not to be forgotten (or God forbid cuckolded). Travelers presented them as gifts to hosts, and beauties shipped fetching miniatures of themselves to foreign lands in hopes of becoming royal brides. Elizabeth I once dispatched Hilliard to paint the Duke of Anjou—a man she would nickname her “frog”—to surmise whether he was pretty enough to marry. (Um, no.)