Wall Decor Quotes

Jace?" "Yeah?" "How did you know I had Shadowhunter blood? Was there some way you could tell?" The elevator arrived with a final groan. Jace unlatched the gate and slid it open. The inside reminded Clary of a birdcage, all black metal and decorative bits of gilt. "I guessed," he said, latching the door behind them. "It seemed like the most likely explanation." "You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me." He pressed a button in the wall, and the elevator lurched into action with a vibrating groan that she felt all through the bones in her feet. "I was ninety percent sure." "I see," Clary said. There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put a hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. "What the hell was that for?" The other ten percent," she said, and they rode the rest of the way down to the street in silence.

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

The walls of your comfort zone are lovingly decorated with your lifelong collection of favorite excuses.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Why must it be so hard For us to come to understand, That there are things we cannot change Hidden amongst the things we can? For we can rearrange our hearts, Dust out the corners of our minds, We can teach our eyes to see Only the things we wish to find. Yet once we decorate our walls And sweep our sorrows off the floor, Why do we look to someone else, To show us how we can be more? For here is where the line Between our can and can't gets tough, Just the point at which we all must learn That we are already enough, That since we cannot choose the home, Our only soul was born into, We should rearrange its rooms But learn to love its window's view.

The kitchen was bright, cheerful yellow, the walls decorated with framed chalk and pencil sketches Simon and Rebecca had done in grade school. Rebecca had some drawing talent, you could tell, but Simon's sketches of people all looked like parking meters with tufts of hair.

Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.

On the other hand, winning awards is cool. Aside from the warm fuzzy, it creates publicity, and that helps spread the word about the book. Plus, this award was a plaque of some sort. I could have used that for all sorts of things. Obviously it would be useful for decorating the barren walls of my house and intimidating my enemies, but that's just for starters.

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books...They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables...I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.

3. “Well, little sister, you’ll be pleased to hear that your treacherous uprising has been quashed before it could really begin,” he said. “The heads of nine of your region’s lords decorate what remains of Slat’s walls. Your pretty little town is no more. Silson has razed it to the ground. I was tempted to add your pretty head to those of your fellow conspirators, but Aaron has persuaded me to be lenient.

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

...I still cannot tap on your walls and discover by the hollow or firm sounds which of your walls are merely decorative, and which ones hold everything up.

It was a privileged existence, but also a cage, beautifully decorated, but locked tight always.

During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.

The room was a compact, informal library. Books stood or were stacked on the shelves that ran along two walls from floor to ceiling, sat on the tables like knickknacks, trooped around the room like soldiers. They struck Malory as more than knowledge or entertainment, even more than stories or information. They were colour and texture, in a haphazard yet somehow intricate decorating scheme. The short leg of the L-shaped room boasted still more books, as well as a small table that held the remains of Dana's breakfast. With her hands on her hips, Dana watched Malory's perusal of her space. She'd seen the reaction before. 'No I haven't read them all, but I will.And no I don't know how many I have. Want coffee?' Let me just ask this. Do you ever actually use the services of the library?' Sure, but I need to own them. If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs. I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work. Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait. - in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987

The great hall was shimmering in light, sun streaming from the open windows, and ablaze with colour, the walls decorated with embroidered hangings in rich shades of gold and crimson. New rushes had been strewn about, fragrant with lavender, sweet woodruff, and balm... the air was... perfumed with honeysuckle and violet, their seductive scents luring in from the gardens butterflies as blue as the summer sky.

Alec surprised Magnus and the werewolf both by breaking away and lunging at Marcy. Whatever he had been planning, it didn’t work: this time the werewolf’s swipe caught him full in the chest. Alec went flying into a hot pink wall decorated with gold glitter. He hit a mirror set into the wall and decorated with curling gold fretwork with enough force to crack the glass across. “Oh, stupid Shadowhunters,” Magnus moaned under his breath. But Alec used his own body hitting the wall as leverage, rebounding off the wall and up, catching a sparkling chandelier and swinging, then dropping down as lightly as a leaping cat and crouching to attack again in one smooth movement. “Stupid, sexy Shadowhunters.

The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside. But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls. It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room. That’s when the stories can move in. They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.

We followed the bondage Bobbsey Twins across the crowded dance floor. Those leather shorts were an adventure from behind, let me tell you. And the pictures of Elvis decorating the walls were an education, too. It wasn’t often you ran into a bondage/Elvis/ whorehouse-themed vampire club.

You want to write a book? Make a song? Direct a movie? Decorate pottery? Learn a dance? Explore a new land? You want to draw a penis on your wall? Do it. Who cares? It’s your birthright as a human being, so do it with a cheerful heart. (I mean, take it seriously, sure—but don’t take it seriously.) Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you.

Love Is the Treasure The temple of love is not love itself; True love is the treasure, Not the walls about it. Do not admire the decoration, But involve yourself in the essence, The perfume that invades and touches you— The beginning and the end. Discovered, this replaces all else, The apparent and the unknowable. Time and space are slaves to this presence.

...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.

If I could remove one thing from the world and replace it with something else, I would erase politics and put art in its place. That way, art teachers would rule the world. And since art is the most supreme form of love, beautiful colors and imagery would weave bridges for peace wherever there are walls. Artists, who are naturally heart-driven, would decorate the world with their love, and in that love — poverty, hunger, lines of division, and wars would vanish from the earth forever. Children of the earth would then be free to play, imagine, create, build and grow without bloodshed, terror and fear.

You can build a relationship for so many years. You can grow it and nurture it, give it foundations and walls, and tinker with how you want it decorated. Then in just one moment, you can blow at it gently by telling the truth and the relationship collapses like a teetering house of cards. Years of careful craftsmanship. One conversation to undo it all.

The palace was beautiful and cold. Each room was different, displaying one rich color after another. Wide pillars and reliefs decorated each room, quartz giving way to marble, marble giving way to onyx, malachite, and granite. While the memory of Mount Olympus from her one childhood visit was hazy, she most clearly remembered the stark white walls and absence of color. The Palace of Hades was its opposite and spoke to its master's dominion over everything that lay within the earth.

Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people. Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses. These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants. My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift? And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes. I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most store-bought flowers. If I owned a bakery, I'd be broke and weigh seven hundred pounds, because I love cake.

It's February, and the walls are halfheartedly hung with Valentine's Day decorations that are supposed to add a sense of festivity, but just seem sadistic, because in an all-boys' detention center, only a select few are finding romance this year.

To the hyper-judgmental gay community, I say this: don't throw stones when you live in glass houses, everyone can see you barebacking strangers from the internet. You also have bad taste. Glass walls? Time to execute your decorator. And yourself.

If there was magic in this world, it happened within sight of the three bases and home plate. All the gems in my world that decorated the walls and floors of dragons' lairs, the sword hilts of privileged princes, and crowns worn by emperors and kings, were nothing compared to the beauty and splendor of the diamond in Wrigley Stadium. It wasn't just a yard with dirt, chalk lines, bases, and a small hill in its center. Wrigley was a field of dreams. Dreams of eternal glory for the men who ran to the outfield, who took their respective bases, and prepared for battle against those who would dare enter their hallowed realm. Dreams for the kids in the stands, all wanting to don a uniform, kiss their moms goodbye, and wield their bats as enchanted weapons destined to knock the cover off the ball. And for the adults who had already selected their lot in life, Wrigley made the dreams of past innocence, lost wonder, and the promise that there was something inherently good still left in the world, come true. Yeah, corny as hell. But all true.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

Do not decorate the walls of your house with the valuable stones from Eubœa and Sparta; but adorn the minds (breasts) of the citizens and of those who administer the state with the instruction which comes from Hellas (Greece). For states are well governed by the wisdom (judgment) of men, but not by stone and wood.

The ... office was decorated in early American Earth Mother, with spider plants, hemp wall tapestries, and beeswax candles.

It is not the walls of your library with their glass and ivory decorations that I am looking for, but the seat of your mind.

That’s when I noticed the damage on the door. Just a little scuffing at the edge. Right about where you’d put a crowbar if you wanted to break in. I winced. “Aww, come on…” I pushed open the door and peeked into the foyer. No sign of Irina or Trond. A decorative vase lay on the ground next to its usual display pedestal. A splash of bright-red blood on the wall— “Nope!” I said. I spun on my heel and stormed back into the hallway. “Nope, nope, nope!

There’s enough thermex inside Kaiser to level a house. So unless you’d like your nice, glowy walls decorated in a lovely new color called blood and brains, I suggest you let me up. Now.

None taken, Ser Jaremy. My father is very fond of spiked heads, especially those of people who have annoyed him in some fashion. And a face as noble as yours, well, no doubt he saw you decorating the city wall above King's Gate. I think you would have looked very striking up there.

Faraday’s home was Spartan. Little decoration. Unimpressive furniture. Rowan’s room had space for only a bed and a small dresser. Citra, at least, had a window, but the view was of a brick wall.

INTERIOR Her mind lives in a quiet room, A narrow room, and tall, With pretty lamps to quench the gloom And mottoes on the wall. There all the things are waxen neat And set in decorous lines; And there are posies, round and sweet, And little, straightened vines. Her mind lives tidily, apart From cold and noise and pain, And bolts the door against her heart, Out wailing in the rain.

No, a home is not where your heart is, it’s where your effort is. It’s where you cook and eat and sleep and take pains to decorate. It’s where your memories are made and kept. It’s the photos on the mantel, the artwork on the walls, the blankets that you snuggle under, the trees and flowers that you plant and care for.

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance.

I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And specially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did.

At nights, one could stand in the courtyard and look up at a rectangle of night sky and survey the stars, but in the daytime the sun bathed the ivy growing on the walls and made the decorative tiles of the fountain glisten. Light, air, and water mixed together to produce a realm of enchantment.

Butter-soft light streamed through the rounded windows, gilding every surface of the unexpectedly bright flat that Evangeline found herself in. The walls were covered in bold yellow and orange flowers, the shelves were speckled with glitter, and the books on them were arranged by the colour of the spine.

Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.

It put him in mind of the grand death of Julius Caesar, stabbed by a throng of Roman senators and dying very decoratively, scarlet on marble, harmoniously framed by columns. Would that some great Sienese could bring himself to die in a like manner, allowing the Maestro to indulge in the scene on a local wall.

There’s a photo of the goddess Durga at the entrance. She’s sitting on a lion. Despite the weapons in her hands, her expression is serene. Maybe that’s true strength: maintaining a sense of peace but having all the tools to fight whatever might be hurled at you. The rest of the house is still the same: no decorations and walls that are cracked and

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall. A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room. And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic.

All of them bearing bullet holes that decorate the walls like deadly art.

The walls were lined with shelves, and she insulated their nest with volumes collected over the years. Their decor was the many colorful spines.

But if we're going to be putting up signs on our walls in our own homes, shouldn't they be encouraging us to do our work well and selflessly instead?

There was no window, and a framed print on the wall (a vase of roses, made using a computer by someone who was dead inside) was more offensive to the eye than a bare wall.

We weren’t even allowed to decorate our rooms or put up posters—Ruby feared tape would rip the paint or nails would damage the walls. The whole place felt more like a showroom than a home.

Keir had never suspected it was possible for a woman to wear so much clothing. After they'd gone to Merritt's bedroom, he'd unfastened the back of her velvet dress and she'd stepped out of it to reveal a profusion of... Christ, he didn't know the names for them... frilly lace-trimmed undergarments that fastened with tiny hooks, ribbons, and buttons. They reminded him of the illustrations pasted on the walls of the Islay baker's shop, of wedding cakes decorated with sugar lace and marzipan pearls, and flowers made of icing. He adored the sight of her in all those pretty feminine things.

Last night, at a press conference, the City Council reminded everyone that the Dog Park is there for our community enjoyment and use, and so it is important that no one enter, look at, or think about the Dog Park. They are adding a new advanced camera system to keep an eye on the great black walls of the Dog Park at all times, and if anyone is caught trying to enter it, they will be forced to enter it, and will never be heard from again. If you see hooded figures in the Dog Park, no you didn’t. The hooded figures are perfectly safe, and should not be approached at any costs. The City Council ended the conference by devouring a raw potato in quick, small bites of their sharp teeth and rough tongues. No follow-up questions were asked, although there were a few follow-up screams. We have also received word via encrypted radio pulses about the opening of a new store: Lenny’s Bargain House of Gardenwares and Machine Parts, which until recently was that abandoned warehouse the government was using for the highly classified and completely secret tests I was telling you about last week. Lenny’s will serve as a helpful new source for all needs involving landscaping and lawn-decorating materials and also as a way for the government to unload all the machines and failed tests and dangerous substances that otherwise would be wasted on things like “safe disposal” or “burying in a concrete tomb until the sun goes out.” Get out to Lenny’s for their big grand opening sale. Find eight government secrets and get a free kidnapping and personality reassignment so that you’ll forget you found them!

I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.

They made their way to the dining room, where the air was blossom-scented and gilded with candlelight. The mammoth Jacobean table, with its legs and support rails carved like twisted rope, had been covered with pristine white linen. A row of broad silver baskets filled with billows of June roses rested on a long runner of frothy green maidenhair ferns. The walls had been lined with lush arrangements of palms, hydrangeas, azaleas and peonies, turning the room into an evening garden. Each place at the table had been set with glittering Irish crystal, Sèvres porcelain, and no fewer than twenty-four pieces of antique Georgian silver flatware per guest.

The flat was large and airy, sparsely furnished with sleek, modern pieces; no walls separated living spaces, except the bedroom. Vintage posters advertising the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Grand Prix de Monaco decorated the walls. There was a picture of Steve McQueen, leaning against his famous Ford Mustang, and another of Carroll Shelby, the legendary American automaker going face-to-face with Enzo Ferrari, his even more legendary Italian counterpart.

First, I see her catch the scent. It's a combination of many things; the Christmas tree in the corner; the musty aroma of old house; orange and clove; ground coffee; hot milk; patchouli; cinnamon- and chocolate, of course; intoxicating, rich as Croesus, dark as death. She looks around, sees wall hangings, pictures, bells, ornaments, a dollhouse in the window, rugs on the floor- all in chrome yellow and fuchsia-pink and scarlet and gold and green and white. It's like an opium den in here, she almost says, then wonders at herself for being so fanciful. In fact she has never seen an opium den- unless it was in the pages of the Arabian Nights- but there's something about the place, she thinks. Something almost- magical.

Paintings all around the city had become soot-blackened, moldy, and brittle. Many of the most important were housed in churches, where they were unprotected from the elements because of holes in the roofs. At the same time, a great many buildings had eroding foundations and crumbling facades. It was a common hazard for chunks of walls bricks, slabs of marble, cornices, and other decorative elements to come crashing down from on high. The whole eastern wall of the Gesuiti Church was in danger of falling into an adjacent canal. After part of a marble angel fell from a parapet of the ornate but sadly dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry's Bar, posted a sign outside the church warning, "Beware of Falling Angels.

Many things combine to show that Midaq Alley is one of the gems of times gone by and that it once shone forth like a flashing star in the history of Cairo. Which Cairo do I mean? That of the Fatimads, the Mamlukes, or the Sultans? Only God and the archaeologists know the answer to that, but in any case, the alley is certainly an ancient relic and a precious one. How could it be otherwise with its stone-paved surface leading directly to the historic Sanadiqiya Street. And then there is its cafe known as "Kirsha's". Its walls decorated with multicolored arabesques, now crumbling, give off strong odors from the medicines of olden times, smells which have now become the spices and folk-cures of today and tomorrow ... Although Midaq Alley lives in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity, it clamors with a distinctive and personal life of its own. Fundamentally and basically, its roots connect with life as a whole and yet, at the same time, it retains a number of the secrets of a world now past.

A sloping, earthy passage inside the barrel travels upwards a little way until a cosy, round, low-ceilinged room is revealed, reminiscent of a badger’s set. The room is decorated in the cheerful, bee-like colours of yellow and black, emphasised by the use of highly polished, honey-coloured wood for the tables and the round doors that lead to the boys’ and girls’ dormitories (furnished with comfortable wooden bedsteads, all covered in patchwork quilts). A colourful profusion of plants and flowers seem to relish the atmosphere of the Hufflepuff common room: various cacti stand on wooden circular shelves (curved to fit the walls), many of them waving and dancing at passers-by, while copper-bottomed plant holders dangling amid the ceiling cause tendrils of ferns and ivies to brush your hair as you pass under them. A portrait over the wooden mantelpiece (carved all over with decorative dancing badgers) shows Helga Hufflepuff, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School, toasting her students with a tiny, two-handled golden cup.

As I completed dinner preparation, Rosie set the table—not the conventional dining table in the living room, but a makeshift table on the balcony, created by taking a whiteboard from the kitchen wall and placing it on top of the two big plant pots, from which the dead plants had been removed. A white sheet from the linen cupboard had been added in the role of tablecloth. Silver cutlery—a housewarming gift from my parents that had never been used—and the decorative wineglasses were on the table. She was destroying my apartment!

I remembered all the Christmases we’d celebrated, always with a huge tree, situated next to the staircase where I now sat. As a child, I’d sat upon that same step, huddled up against the balus- ters, studying the tree, its shape and decorations; enthralled by the magical light and shadows upon the walls around me. Dancing. Over Christmas the only light in the hallway had come from the silver candelabra burning on the hallway table. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day night small candles were attached to the branches of the tree, their soft light reflected in the vast chande- lier suspended high above and thrown back across the walls like stars across the universe. I remembered the smell, that mingling of pine and wax and burning logs: the smell of home, the smell of happiness. I’d sat there in my nightgown, listening to the chime of crystal; the laughter, music and voices emanating from another room, an adult world I could only imagine. And always hoping for a glimpse of Mama, as she whooshed across the marble floor, beautiful, resplendent . . . invincible.

Ten neatly coiffed female attendants stand against the walls, ready and waiting. Wearing starched yellow blouses with pink crossover ties neatly folded under the collar, they look as much a part of the ship’s decoration as the sparkling crystal chandeliers that hang overhead.

Four construction workers sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook, an old man who died several days ago, has been allowed to rot on his stool. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease.

For years, he devoted the whole of his energy, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to mathematics. He did not read newspapers, watch television or go to the cinema. He liked ugly women, squalid apartments, dilapidated rooms. He worked cloistered in a cold office with flaking paint falling from the walls, his back turned to the only window, with pen and paper on his desk and only four objects as decoration: his mother’s death mask, a small wire sculpture of a goat, a jar of Spanish olives, and a charcoal portrait of his father, drawn in Le Vernet concentration camp.

Practically the first action of the Neanderthal—on the happy day he evolved out of the monkey egg—was to draw a picture on a cave wall of a man with an enormous willy. Or, indeed, perhaps it was the first action of a woman. After all, we’re more interested in (a) cocks and (b) decorating.

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.

The name of the pub is the Perdition. A thick layer of soot coats the walls but anyone who strains a little can make out the mural. It is the dance of death. Peasants and burghers, noblemen and priests, join hands around a skeleton who is playing a fiddle as black as tar. The painting makes many ill at ease and the few customers can be easily counted until the hour is late and the level of intoxication has stripped all decorations of their relevance. The innkeeper Gedda has opposed all attempts at persuasion to whitewash his walls. The mural is painted by Hoffbro himself, he snarls, and a masterpiece at that.

Elane scan the room and takeing in the white antiseptec decor of Buzzfeed office in Soho. Her eyes land on a wall decoratien, a glareing yellow butten about the size of a parasol. It read simply: LOL. It seem to mock her. Honestly? Elane just dosent fit in here. No one here is under 30 and to Elane it is almost like nobody speaking Englesh. Everything is "HTML 5" this and "Keven Ware sports injery" that and "Game Of Throans recap" this and "Downten Abby parady tumblr" that. She have no idea what any of that mean. She open her face book and feal deep pit of emptynes as she click thru the profiles of her 17 face book frends.

The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had.

Betty once had self-image problems, but she overcame them. A Morninglight poster decorates her wall. Much-read pamphlets sit in her bathroom. Philip Marquard's audio book on self-actualisation plays in her earphones. Fresh signatures fill the forms on her clipboard. Bottles of Morninglight dietary supplements and nutrient pills fill her medicine cabinet. By her bed is an autographed picture of Philip Marquard, the one she secretly kisses before going to sleep. Every night she dreams of freeing herself from her mortal shell and ascending into the cosmos to soar with the whale-mollusc gods. There are new recruits chained to Betty's walls. She has their signatures. They tested as having self-image problems, as she once had. Smiling, she tells them they are all beautiful. She opens them with a knife, shows them the beauty inside. "Look!" she says, tears streaming. "We are all made of stars!" Then she practises eating stars, waiting for enlightenment to take hold.

Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort? How did it feel? He'd been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he'd also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it. And he'd been in mansions that felt like mausoleums.

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings—just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton’s wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened.

The mantle of intellectual meaninglessness shrouds every aspect of our common life. Events, things, and “information” flood over us, overwhelming us, disorienting us with threats and possibilities we for the most part have no idea what to do about. Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint. They decorate us. We willingly emblazon messages on our shirts, caps—even the seat of our pants. Sometime back we had a national campaign against highway billboards. But the billboards were nothing compared to what we now post all over our bodies. We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”—silent and not so silent.

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. “Mister Jem,” he said, “we’re mighty glad to have you all here. Don’t pay no ’tention to Lula, she’s contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She’s a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an’ haughty ways—we’re mighty glad to have you all.” With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church’s only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt’s The Light of the World.

He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way the inhabitants think and feel corresponds to the town they live in. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in certain women who, during their pregnancy, surround themselves with harmonious objects, calm statues, bright gardens, delicate curios, so that their child-to-be, under their influence, will be beautiful. In the same way one cannot imagine a genius coming from other than a magnificent town. Goethe was born in Frankfurt, a noble city where the Main flows between venerable palaces, between walls where the ancient heart of Germany lives on. Hoffmann explains Nuremberg - his soul performs acrobatics on the gables like a gnome on the decorated face of an old German clock. In France there is Rouen, with its rich accumulation of architectural monuments, its. cathedral like an oasis of stone, which produced Corneille and then Flaubert, two pure geniuses shaking hands across the centuries. There is no doubt about it, beautiful towns make beautiful souls.

MY DREAM If I could remove one thing from the world and replace it with something else, I would erase politics and put art in its place. That way, art teachers would rule the world. And since art is the most supreme form of love, beautiful colors and imagery would weave bridges for peace wherever there are walls. Artists, who are naturally heart-driven, would decorate the world with their love, and in that love — poverty, hunger, lines of division, and wars would vanish from the earth forever. Children of the earth would then be free to play, imagine, create, build and grow without bloodshed, terror and fear. Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. And if we keep recycling through the exact same kind of leaders— the kind who do not propel us forward, but only hold us back—then perhaps what we really need now is a completely different style of leadership altogether. We need heart-driven leaders, not strictly mind-driven ones. We need compassionate humanitarians, not greedy businessmen. Peacemakers, not war instigators. We need unity, not division. Angels, not devils.

Thandi looks at the rag dolls and the coasters and key chains and handcrafted jewelry that Delores delicately places inside the basket. How would visitors know the real stories behind the faces of the wooden masks they'd buy to have on walls; the rag dolls they'd use to decorate unused furniture in their houses; the figurines they'd place on mantels that they can marvel at and then quickly forget?

As Desdemona continued on about the administrative details of the business, her eyelids lazing at half-mast all the while, Elsie’s attention was drawn to the decorations on the office’s walls. She had always assumed that dust could only collect on a horizontal surface, but the Unthank Home’s drab green walls proved otherwise—a thin sheen of gray dust seemed to nearly act as a second coat of paint.

Her small bedroom was decorated with cheerfully embroidered samplers, which she had stitched herself, and a shelf containing an intricate shellwork tableau. In her parlor, the chimneypiece was crammed with pottery owls, sheep, and dogs, and dishes painted with blue and white Chinoiserie fruits and flowers. Along the picture rail of one wall was an array of brightly colored plates. Dotted about the other walls were half a dozen seascape engravings showing varying climactic conditions, from violent tempest to glassy calm. To the rear was an enormous closet that she used as a storeroom, packed with bottled delicacies such as greengage plums in syrup, quince marmalade, nasturtium pickles, and mushroom catsup, which infused all three rooms with the sharp but tantalizing aromas of vinegar, fruit, and spices.

The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black verticle stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the verticle stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize verticle forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself.

You are the TEACHER. Some people are so stuck on what you did in the past, that they don't realize that you forgave yourself, matured, and graduated from what happened. Yet here they are stuck on that memory..wondering how you were able to move on. Time waits for no one and life keeps going. When haters try to remind you of your past, starve their attention with silence..Just realize that you don't have time to supervise adults. You got things to do and individuals to mentor. What was designed to crush you just strengthened your walk, put confidence in your talk, and encouraged you to be content with You. Their presence or opinion is only entertainment in the bleachers, tolerated decorations on the wall, and the uncelebrated clown at your events. Remember you are the teacher and they are the student...take charge of your classroom!!

I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls— it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? —Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem “The Wall Within” by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. “The Wall Within” was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record.

No picture of a medieval library can be complete unless it be remembered that in many cases beauty was no less an object than utility. The bookcases were fine specimens of carpentry-work, carved and decorated; the pavement was of encaustic tiles worked in patterns; the walls were decorated with plaster-work in relief; the windows were filled with stained glass; and the roof-timbers were ornamented with the coat-armour of benefactors.

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I’d felt as I came in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn’t before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again. I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house’s depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone. What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up—successful mad scientists generally are—but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked…lived in.

She insisted that they focus their energies on raising a little girl who was, by nature, a tangle of mischief and motion and curiosity. Each day, Luna’s ability to break rules in new and creative ways was an astonishment to all who knew her. She tried to ride the goats, tried to roll boulders down the mountain and into the side of the barn (for decoration, she explained), tried to teach the chickens to fly, and once almost drowned in the swamp. (Glerk saved her. Thank goodness.) She gave ale to the geese to see if it made them walk funny (it did) and put peppercorns in the goat’s feed to see if it would make them jump (they didn’t jump; they just destroyed the fence). Every day she goaded Fyrian into making atrocious choices or she played tricks on the poor dragon, making him cry. She climbed, hid, built, broke, wrote on the walls, and spoiled dresses when they had only just been finished. Her hair ratted, her nose smudged, and she left handprints wherever she went.

The interior looked like I expected. Two rooms--a main one and a tiny bedroom. Dusty stuffed fish and moth-eaten elk heads on bare walls. A wood plank floor that seemed as if it hadn’t been swept in years. Cobwebs decorating the ceiling. Furniture that would have been rejected by Goodwill. Mouse droppings everywhere. A few dark furry bat forms hung from the upper eaves. In the city, the place would have been condemned as a public health hazard. Here, it was just a typical hunting shack.

It was dim inside, the only light filtering in through small windows. For a moment I hesitated, and said a prayer, inaudible, inarticulate, yet real. Then I looked around. That scene will remain with me forever. Each casket was draped with a beautiful American flag. Never before had the flag seemed to have such sublime significance and beauty. About the walls were other flags, American and French; flower petals had been scattered over the floor, and outside I could hear the band playing a hymn.

My son was something of a disciple of flying things. On his bedroom wall were posters of fighter planes and wild birds. A model of a helicopter was chandeliered to his ceiling. His birthday cake, which sat before me on the picnic table, was decorated with a picture of a rocket ship - a silver-white missile with discharging thrusters. I had been hoping that the baker would place a few stars in the frosting as well (the cake in the catalog was dotted with yellow candy sequins), but when I opened the box I found that they were missing. So this is what I did: as Joshua stood beneath the swing set, fishing for something in his pocket, I planted his birthday candles deep in the cake. I pushed them in until each wick was surrounded by only a shallow bracelet of wax. Then I called the children over from the swing set. They came, tearing up divots in the grass. We sang happy birthday as I held a match to the candles. Joshua closed his eyes. "Blow out the stars," I said, and his cheeks rounded with air.

Then she dove into the morning cleaning. There weren't many rooms in the tower, which made it easy, but she liked to be thorough. Sweep, mop, polish. The garderobe and her mirror got sparkly from scrubbing with a bit of vinegar (a trick she learned from Book #14: Useful Recipes for Master Servants). She transferred a day dress that was soaking in a soapy bucket to a clean water bucket, scrubbing out the bit of lingonberry juice stain from breakfast on Monday. 7:00: Personal ablutions. She washed her face and nails and applied cream to her cuticles and everywhere on her face but the T-zone, which was, despite her fairy-tale beauty, just a tad prone to breaking out. 8:00: Reading. She (re)read Book #26, Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo. More a pamphlet than a book, but it counted. 8:30: Art! Lacking a proper canvas (or piece of wall space) she chose to spend her painting time decorating the mop handle. It might not be dry enough to actually use the next day, but that was all right. Birthday weeks meant the occasional break from routine-- that was part of the fun!

What do you mean, you never have a chance to talk to me? We see each other all the time.” I patted the bed. “We live together.” “Yeah, exactly. And that’s about it.” He was off the bed now, pacing, scratching the side of his neck, like he always did when he was nervous. “We see each other all the time, but we never talk. The little we do is about nothing; I mention the baby, our baby, and you turn to stone.” Billy stopped pacing and looked away from me to a point above my head, a blank wall—my room had no decorations. “I’m so lonely.

During the seventh inning stretch, we stood up and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Jason and I swayed together. I couldn’t have been happier. The Rangers won. “See how it makes a difference when rituals are honored?” Jason said, his arm around my waist keeping me anchored against his side. “I’m too happy to argue,” I said. We stopped off in the gift shop, and he bought me a Texas Rangers cap. “Maybe you can start decorating a wall with caps from the games we go to,” he said. I grinned broadly, because I knew what he was really saying: Tonight was just the beginning for us.

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like. It was like this: It was inside out. Actually inside out, to the extent that they had had to park on the carpet. All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semicircular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe. Where it got really odd was the roof. It folded back on itself like something that M. C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative’s purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up. Confusing. The sign above the front door said “Come Outside,” and so, nervously, they had. Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done pointing, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off. And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had M. C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself. “Hello,” said John Watson, Wonko the Sane. Good, they thought to themselves, “hello” is something we can cope with. “Hello,” they said, and all, surprisingly, was smiles.

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

Loneliness is one of the most universal human experiences, but our contemporary Western society has heightened the awareness of our loneliness to an unusual degree. During a recent visit to New York City, I wrote the following note to myself: Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patroling policeman keeps reminding me that people are not out to help each other. But when my eyes wander over the walls of the train covered with invitations to buy more or new products, I see young, beautiful people enjoying each other in a gentle embrace, playful men and women smiling at each other in fast sailboats, proud explorers on horseback encouraging each other to take brave risks, fearless children dancing on a sunny beach, and charming girls always ready to serve me in airplanes and ocean liners. While the subway train runs from one dark tunnel into the other and I am nervously aware where I keep my money, the words and images decorating my fearful world speak about love, gentleness, tenderness and about a joyful togetherness of spontaneous people.

A man once made it a reproach that I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and that we live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, and pointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated the tennis–court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not be shaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, with everything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and diet ourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come, and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could be borne perhaps with cheerfulness. ‘And have not even such things their sunny side?’ I exclaimed. ‘When I am steeped to the lips in diseases and doctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests my women friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall say next and wishing they would go.’ He replied that all around me lay misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and tragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable and discontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he said that we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrink from mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered that it was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shaking head, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwards that a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dying had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him and to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into my garden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, ‘It is the Will of God.’ He was a missionary.

He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. As he said: ‘At first you always see what’s alive and vibrant. You’re delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colours, by the smells and all that. But the longer you’re in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it’s time to move on.’ He added that when we are in motion, there’s no time for such idle meditations. Which is why to people on trips everything seems new and clean, virginal, and, in some sense, immortal.

lack, or loutish and crass kollective is a program dedicated to the proposition that vulgarity and bad taste are an inalienable right. the lackies, as they are sometimes called, meet if they feel like it at program headquarters, which is known as La Gaucherie. La Gaucherie is densely furnished with seven thousand always-in-operation console color televisions, nine hundred constantly blaring quadrophonic stereos, shag rugs in six hundred and seventy-eight decorator colors, and am eclectic mix of Mediterranean-style dining room sets, fun sofas, interesting wall hangings, and modular seating systems. These members not otherwise occupied practicing the electric guitar or writing articles for Playgirl sit around in unduly comfortable positions expressing their honest feelings and opinions in loud tones of voice. Male lackies are encouraged to leave unbuttoned the first five buttons of their shirts unless they have unusually pale skin and hairy chests, in which case they are required to do so. Female members are encouraged to encourage them. Both sexes participate in a form of meditation that consists of breathing deeply of musk oil while wearing synthetic fabrics. The eventual goal of this discipline is to reach the state of mind known as Los Angeles.

The house was inherited. Death had furnished it for her. She trod in the dining-room on the Turkey carpet of her fathers; she regulated her day by the excellent black clock on the mantelpiece which she remembered from childhood; her walls were entirely covered by the photographs her illustrious deceased friends had either given herself or her father, with their own handwriting across the lower parts of their bodies, and the windows, shrouded by the maroon curtains of all her life, were decorated besides with the selfsame aquariums to which she owed her first lessons in sealore, and in which still swam slowly the goldfishes of her youth.

Deacon met my glare with an impish grin. “Anyway, did you celebrate Valentine’s Day when you were slumming with the mortals?” I blinked. “Not really. Why?” Aiden snorted and then disappeared into one of the rooms. “Follow me,” Deacon said. “You’re going to love this. I just know it.” I followed him down the dimly-lit corridor that was sparsely decorated. We passed several closed doors and a spiral staircase. Deacon went through an archway and stopped, reaching along the wall. Light flooded the room. It was a typical sunroom, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, wicker furniture, and colorful plants. Deacon stopped by a small potted plant sitting on a ceramic coffee table. It looked like a miniature pine tree that was missing several limbs. Half the needles were scattered in and around the pot. One red Christmas bulb hung from the very top branch, causing the tree to tilt to the right. “What do you think?” Deacon asked. “Um… well, that’s a really different Christmas tree, but I’m not sure what that has to do with Valentine’s Day.” “It’s sad,” Aiden said, strolling into the room. “It’s actually embarrassing to look at. What kind of tree is it, Deacon?” He beamed. “It’s called a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree.” Aiden rolled his eyes. “Deacon digs this thing out every year. The pine isn’t even real. And he leaves it up from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. Which thank the gods is the day after tomorrow. That means he’ll be taking it down.” I ran my fingers over the plastic needles. “I’ve seen the cartoon.” Deacon sprayed something from an aerosol can. “It’s my MHT tree.” “MHT tree?” I questioned. “Mortal Holiday Tree,” Deacon explained, and smiled. “It covers the three major holidays. During Thanksgiving it gets a brown bulb, a green one for Christmas, and a red one for Valentine’s Day.” “What about New Year’s Eve?” He lowered his chin. “Now, is that really a holiday?” “The mortals think so.” I folded my arms. “But they’re wrong. The New Year is during the summer solstice,” Deacon said. “Their math is completely off, like most of their customs. For example, did you know that Valentine’s Day wasn’t actually about love until Geoffrey Chaucer did his whole courtly love thing in the High Middle Ages?” “You guys are so weird.” I grinned at the brothers. “That we are,” Aiden replied. “Come on, I’ll show you your room.” “Hey Alex,” Deacon called. “We’re making cookies tomorrow, since it’s Valentine’s Eve.” Making cookies on Valentine’s Eve? I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as Valentine’s Eve. I laughed as I followed Aiden out of the room. “You two really are opposites.” “I’m cooler!” Deacon yelled from his Mortal Holiday Tree room

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

This doesn’t mean that we should be sad, or go deaf, even if once a century these conditions produce sublime music. Nor must we be great artists in order to view our own struggles as objects of creative transformation. What if we simply took whatever pain we couldn’t get rid of, and turned it into something else? We could write, act, study, cook, dance, compose, do improv, dream up a new business, decorate our kitchens; there are hundreds of things we could do, and whether we do them “well,” or with distinction, is beside the point. This is why “arts therapy”—in which people express and process their troubles by making art—can be so effective, even if its practitioners don’t exhibit their work on gallery walls.

The room itself was what decorators would probably call severe. The walls and high ceilings were white, and the room itself was sparsely furnished with a few pieces of antique furniture. The only voluptuous element in the large room was the champagne-colored velvet drapes tied back with white ribbons. The two or three antique chairs had apparently been chosen for their bizarre design and not for their ability to seat anyone, for they were delicate suggestions, hints at furniture with cushions barely capable of accommodating a child. A human in such a room was expected not to rest or sit or even relax, but rather pose, thereby transforming himself into a human furnishing that would complement the decor as well as possible.

Marie Antoinette would have loved this place!" Piper Donovan stood agape, her green eyes opened wide, as she took in the magical space. Crystal chandeliers, dripping with glittering prisms, hung from the mirrored ceiling. Gilded moldings crowned the pale pink walls. Gleaming glass cases displayed vibrant fruit tarts, puffy éclairs, and powdered beignets. Exquisitely decorated cakes of all flavors and sizes rested on pedestals alongside trays of pastel meringues and luscious napoleons. Cupcakes, cookies, croissants, and cream-filled pastries dusted with sugar or drizzled with chocolate beckoned from the shelves. "It's unbelievable," she whispered. "I feel like I've walked into a jewel box---one made of confectioners' sugar but a jewel box nonetheless.

All my hard work had come to fruition that day: the new fireplace housed a might Yule log that warmed the room, casting reflections across the crystal and silver. I admired the forest green of the brocaded furniture, and the holly gathered in red ribbons hung about the walls. I decided that whatever temper Michael might be in, I would not let him spoil our first Christmas. The new damask cloth was spread with a fine repast: Peg's own Yule cakes looked even daintier than those I had already sampled. A great wheel of cheese had pride of place, beside magnificent pies of game and fruit. On a great round platter was a salamagundy salad as fresh as a bouquet of flowers; concentric rings of every delight: eggs, chicken, ham, beetroot, anchovies, and orange.

The night darkened. Our day's works had been done. We thought that the last guest had arrived for the night and the doors in the village were all shut. Only some said the king was to come. We laughed and said `No, it cannot be!' It seemed there were knocks at the door and we said it was nothing but the wind. We put out the lamps and lay down to sleep. Only some said, `It is the messenger!' We laughed and said `No, it must be the wind!' There came a sound in the dead of the night. We sleepily thought it was the distant thunder. The earth shook, the walls rocked, and it troubled us in our sleep. Only some said it was the sound of wheels. We said in a drowsy murmur, `No, it must be the rumbling of clouds!' The night was still dark when the drum sounded. The voice came `Wake up! delay not!' We pressed our hands on our hearts and shuddered with fear. Some said, `Lo, there is the king's flag!' We stood up on our feet and cried `There is no time for delay!' The king has come---but where are lights, where are wreaths? Where is the throne to seat him? Oh, shame! Oh utter shame! Where is the hall, the decorations? Someone has said, `Vain is this cry! Greet him with empty hands, lead him into thy rooms all bare!' Open the doors, let the conch-shells be sounded! in the depth of the night has come the king of our dark, dreary house. The thunder roars in the sky. The darkness shudders with lightning. Bring out thy tattered piece of mat and spread it in the courtyard. With the storm has come of a sudden our king of the fearful night.

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance. There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars.

sometimes i feel more like a house than a person with the way i decorate my body and my face to hide damaged walls and empty spaces; my heart is more like a door with changed locks because i've made multiple keys for people who walked all over me with filthy shoes, people who said they could live here, but they were just passing through. i hope my eyes are not windows, because i fear what the world might see— all of my flaws and insecurities on display like a coffee table or some shoddy love seat. sometimes i swear i left the oven on and forgot because my mind feels like a smoke detector with the way my apprehension never calms. i smell smoke, but i can't see it; i'm told things are never as bad as i make them, but every wildfire starts with a spark and it's easy to burn when you're a house made of straw.

Decorated in exotic tones of saffron, gold, ruby, and cinnamon with accent walls representing the natural movement of wind and fire, and a cascading waterfall layered with beautiful landscaped artificial rocks and tiny plastic animals, the restaurant was the embodiment of her late brother's dream to re-create "India" in the heart of San Francisco. The familiar scents- cinnamon, pungent turmeric, and smoky cumin- brought back memories of evenings spent stirring dal, chopping onions, and rolling roti in the bustling kitchen of her parents' first restaurant in Sunnyvale under the watchful army of chefs who followed the recipes developed by her parents. What had seemed fun as a child, and an imposition as a teenager, now filled her with a warm sense of nostalgia, although she would have liked just one moment of her mother's time.

Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good." Raoul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from that building which he detested as a prison whose jailer he could feel walking within the walls... the jailer Erik... But she took him to the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well, in the doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's performance. On another day, she wandered with him, hand in hand, along the deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a decorator's skillful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theatre. An occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an adorable pout of her lips: "You, a sailor!" And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage that led them to the little girls' dancing-school, where brats between six and ten were practicing their steps, in the hope of becoming great dancers one day, "covered with diamonds..." Meanwhile, Christine gave them sweets instead. She took him to the wardrobe and property-rooms, took him all over her empire, which was artificial, but immense, covering seventeen stories from the ground-floor to the roof and inhabited by an army of subjects. She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their labors, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practiced every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself in all their troubles and all their little hobbies. She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them, sitting on some worm-eaten "property," would listen to the legends of the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old Breton tales.

Every day leaflets fall from the sky, Japanese planes whirring overhead and letting loose propaganda, all over the colony, telling the Chinese and the Indians not to fight, to join with the Japanese in a “Greater Far Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere.” They’ve been collecting them as they fall on the ground, stacking them in piles, and Trudy wakes up on Christmas Day and declares a project, to make wallpaper out of them. In their dressing gowns, they put on Christmas carols, make hot toddies, and—in a fit of wild, Yuletide indulgence—use all the flour for pancakes, and paste the leaflets on the living room wall—a grimly ironic decoration. One has a drawing of a Chinese woman sitting on the lap of a fat Englishman, and says the English have been raping your women for years, stop it now, or something to that effect, in Chinese, or so Trudy says.

I DIDN’T START OUT AS A BOOK LOVER,” admits Phillip Lim. “Initially, it was more about pragmatism: seeking knowledge having to do with research on work, on my interiors, building a home, even a word I wanted to understand more. But what I love about books is, once you start, you get to go deeper and deeper and deeper into a subject, and from there you go to another book, and another book, and soon after, you have a wall of books. And then you have two walls of books. And then—” The designer indicates the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that serve as the focal point of his loft apartment. “Books are how I learn,” Lim continues, “but I’m not nostalgic. I hate to look back; books inform you, but then they also become decoration. That may sound horrible to a true book lover, but I feel I honor them by making these objects part of my aesthetic world.” PHILLIP LIM

I wore an emerald long-sleeved dress by Vivienne Tam and a pair of tangerine Christian Louboutins. I had seen the same look in one of Emerald's Vogues and asked Giada to overnight it. I learned quickly, though I wasn't very original. I'd changed in a coffee shop next to my apartment, then hopped into a cab. "Next time we must coordinate outfits beforehand," Michael whispered as we sat down. "I was going for 'salt of the earth' today." "Oh, I wanted to match the décor," I said. Tellicherry felt like a sexy, sinister jewel box. A rich sapphire blue stained the walls in large, meandering splotches, like dye dropped into water. Bronze silk leaped and dipped in the cushions. The waitresses wore black dresses with seductive lace panels revealing flesh-colored bits, and the waiters slinked in semi-sheer pajama-like outfits, conjuring bedtime escapades, none of which involved sleeping.

She took me through the parlors and the kitchen, and I marveled at the beautiful ceiling molding, the wooden banisters up to the second floor, the crystalline chandelier in the dining room. The furniture was tasteful and sparse, plastic over the fainting couches and coffee tables and wingback chairs, so that as they stood in stasis they wouldn't collect dust. The second floor was just as gorgeous, the rooms all themed in different flowers. The yellow daffodil room was my favorite. The wall with the headboard had an entire mural of huge daffodils blooming across it. Junie's handiwork, I was sure. Just like the mural on the side of Frank's Auto Shop, and the logo for the Grumpy Possum, and even Gail's bar scene. She showed me all the different rooms, each with a different flower theme and a different focal color--- lavender and coral and sage. The pink ones--- roses--- matched Junie's pastel hair.

The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.

Grudgingly, she approved the commission, provided he use only child-safe paints and that the work be done within twenty-four hours. Gabriel hurried off to a nearby paint store with his bodyguards in tow and returned in short order with the necessary supplies. With a few strokes of a roller—an instrument he had never used before—he obliterated Chiara’s work beneath a fresh layer of pale blue paint. It remained too wet to work more that evening, so he rose early the next morning and swiftly decorated the wall in a bank of glowing Titianesque clouds. Lastly, he added a small child angel, a boy, who was peering downward over the edge of the highest cloud on the scene below. The figure was borrowed from Veronese’s Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints. With tears in his eyes and a trembling hand, Gabriel gave the angel the face of his son as it appeared on the night of his death. Then he signed his name and the date, and it was done.

I’ve made peace with it. Besides, I’m not alone in my misery. Winston and I both got dumped years ago, and we’ve been happy being bitter ever since. In fact, we’ve decided to make ugly collages and use them to decorate our place. He’s going to gather up anything with Brendan’s handwriting on it and use it to papier-mâché a bunch of toilet rolls. I’m going to bang my head against the wall until it leaves an impression. We figure it’s finally time to put up some art in the living room. Winston calls it depressing chic.” “Nazeera didn’t dump you. You know that. She just couldn’t stay here. She has to live on the other side of the world. Her people are there—” “I know. And look, I’m not bitter about it. We had a good run, but we’re rebuilding our world. I get it; we all have work to do. She needs to be in West Asia, and long distance is super hard. But she wanted to reconnect with her roots, her culture, her people. For an indefinite period of time. That’s called being dumped. That’s called I’m probably going to marry some hot Arab dude and lose your number. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

There were no furnishings and no decorations-- except the wall on the opposite side had a small alcove, and in the alcove was a bronze statue of a bird, green with age. I thought it might be a sparrow, but it was so corroded that I couldn't tell for sure. I wondered if it might be the statue of a Lar. In this room--like the first hallway-- the air smelled of summer. But there was no half-heard laughter on the air, no sense that space was subtly wrong, nor that invisible eyes were watching. There was only the warm, peaceful stillness that exists between one summer breeze and the next. A trickle of water ran down the wall on my left and pooled before the alcove; I drew a breath, and my lungs filled with the mineral scent of water over warm rock. Without thinking, I sat down and leaned back against the wall. It was not smooth; the stones formed hard, uneven ripples behind my back-- yet the tension ran out of my body. I stared at the bronze sparrow, and I did not entirely fall asleep, but I almost dreamt: my mind was full of summer breezes, the warm, wet smell of earth after summer rain, the delight of running barefoot through damp grass and finding the hidden tangle of strawberries.

Wiser and more capable men than I shall ever be have put their findings before you, findings so rich and so full of anger, serenity, murder, healing, truth, and love that it seems incredible the world were not destroyed and fulfilled in the instant, but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all your poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration; Swift loved individuals but hated the human race; Kafka is a fad; Blake is in the Modern Library; Freud is a Modern Library Giant; Dovschenko’s Frontier is disliked by those who demand that it fit the Eisenstein esthetic; nobody reads Joyce any more; Céline is a madman who has incurred the hearty dislike of Alfred Kazin, reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune book section, and is, moreover, a fascist; I hope I need not mention Jesus Christ of whom you have managed to make a dirty gentile. However

Female sensibility is layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, lifestories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, ink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon, roots skins, walls, yellow, flowers, streams, puzzles, questions, stuffing, sewing, fluffing, satin, hearts, tearing, tearing, tearing, tying, decorating, baking, feeding, holding, listening, seeing thru the layers, oil, varnish, shellac, jell, paste, glue, seeds, thread, more, not less, repetition, women critics, women, writers, women artists, either nourishing us or eating us up alive, tokenism, curators, universities, tokenism, fear of other women to acknowledge female sensibility, hostile boy artists, accepting men artists, separating the men from the boys, dividing women, piece of pie-ism, money, art, sex, beasts, layers, symphonies, multi-roled, multi-part, stories, narrative, paint/flesh, serious, overwhelming, soft, hard, women working, working women, hanging, dangling, breaking, being fruity, angry, naïve, born again and trying to describe hot white flesh ties.

how he would get to Tronjheim’s base—where the Urgals were breaking in. There was no time to climb down. He looked at the narrow trough to the right of the stairs, then grabbed one of the leather pads and threw himself down on it. The stone slide was smooth as lacquered wood. With the leather underneath him, he accelerated almost instantly to a frightening speed, the walls blurring and the curve of the slide pressing him high against the wall. Eragon lay completely flat so he would go faster. The air rushed past his helm, making it vibrate like a weather vane in a gale. The trough was too confined for him, and he was perilously close to flying out, but as long as he kept his arms and legs still, he was safe. It was a swift descent, but it still took him nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom. The slide leveled out at the end and sent him skidding halfway across the huge carnelian floor. When he finally came to a stop, he was too dizzy to walk. His first attempt to stand made him nauseated, so he curled up, head in his hands, and waited for things to stop spinning. When he felt better, he stood and warily looked around. The great chamber was completely deserted, the silence unsettling. Rosy light filtered down from Isidar Mithrim. He faltered—Where was he supposed to go?—and cast out his mind for the Twins. Nothing. He froze as loud knocking echoed through Tronjheim. An explosion split the air. A long slab of the chamber floor buckled and blew thirty feet up. Needles of rocks flew outward as it crashed down. Eragon stumbled back, stunned, groping for Zar’roc. The twisted shapes of Urgals clambered out of the hole in the floor. Eragon hesitated. Should he flee? Or should he stay and try to close the tunnel? Even if he managed to seal it before the Urgals attacked him, what if Tronjheim was already breached elsewhere? He could not find all the places in time to prevent the city-mountain from being captured. But if I run to one of Tronjheim’s gates and blast it open, the Varden could retake Tronjheim without having to siege it. Before he could decide, a tall man garbed entirely in black armor emerged from the tunnel and looked directly at him. It was Durza. The Shade carried his pale blade marked with the scratch from Ajihad. A black roundshield with a crimson ensign rested on his arm. His dark helmet was richly decorated, like a general’s, and a long snakeskin cloak billowed around him. Madness burned in his maroon eyes, the madness of one who enjoys power and finds himself in the position to use it.

His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Irabestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling’s edge kept the tribes of Gog and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind the bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.

Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalization: And so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You’re picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home? Certain things she’d always loved, like lighting the dinner-table candles or stirring a cake mix alongside her mother or sitting up on the roof to play her accordion or decorating the Christmas tree or collecting the eggs in the morning, felt suddenly hollow, distant, staged. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, as if she was viewing her existence from behind a glass wall. And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbors’ horses—which she hardly ever did anymore, she didn’t know why—she wouldn’t have the energy, the sap in her, to do it. She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?

The walls behind the counter had deep floor-to-ceiling shelves for vases and jam jars and scented candles, and there was an old wrought-iron revolving stand for cards. But most of the space in the long, narrow shop was taken up with flowers and plants. Today there were fifty-two kinds of cut blooms, from the tiny cobalt-blue violets that were smaller than Lara's little fingernail to a purple-and-green-frilled brassica that was bigger than her head. The flowers were set out in gleaming metal buckets and containers of every shape and size. They were lined up on the floor three deep and stacked on the tall three-tier stand in the middle of the shop. The plants, huge leafy ferns and tiny fleshy succulents, lemon trees and jasmine bushes and freckled orchids, were displayed on floating shelves that were built at various heights all the way up to the ceiling. Lara had spent weeks getting the lighting right. There were a few soft spotlights above the flower displays, and an antique crystal chandelier hung low above the counter. There were strings of fairy lights and dozens of jewel-colored tea lights and tall, slender lanterns dotted between the buckets. When they were lit, they cast star and crescent moon shapes along the walls and the shop resembled the courtyard of a Moroccan riad- a tiny walled garden right in the middle of the city.

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

It is possible to get too hung up about this point. In, for example, the genealogical multiple pile-up of Swabia with almost every hill under its own prince, it is possible to imagine a feudal version of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library, a world of so many hundreds of rulers that every variation of behaviour is possible, or indeed certain, in any given moment. So somewhere a ruler with a huge grey beard is dying surrounded by his weeping family and retainers; somewhere else a bored figure is irritably shooting bits off the plaster decorations in the ballroom; another is making an improper suggestion to a stable boy; another is telling an anecdote about fighting the Turks, staring into space, girding for battle, converting to Calvinism, wishing he had a just slightly bigger palace, and so on. This dizzying multiplicity makes each of hundreds of castles a frightening challenge – with the possibility of the guide making my head explode with the dizzying details of how the young duchess had been walled up in a tower for being caught in a non-spiritual context with her confessor and how as a result the Strelitz-Nortibitz inheritance had passed, unexpectedly, to a cousin resident in Livonia who, on his way home to claim the dukedom, died of plague in a tavern near Rothenberg thus activating the claim of the very odd dowager’s niece, long resident in a convent outside Bamberg. But it is probably time to move on.

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.

It is related that Satan came before Yahyâ . The latter saw that Satan had plucks of everything on his body. He asked him: “O Satan! What are these plucks?” He replied: “These are the desires with which I hunt mankind.” Yahyâ asked: “Do you have any of my plucks there?” He replied: “Perhaps you ate a stomach full which caused you to feel heavy and uncomfortable in offeringsalâh and remembering Allâh .” Yahyâ asked: “Is there anything else?” He replied: “No.” Yahyâ said: “I take an oath that I will never fill my stomach with food.” Satan said to him: “I take an oath that I will never advise a Muslim.” Among them is the love to have beautiful utensils, clothing and to adorn and decorate the house. When Satan sees that this quality has overpowered the heart of a particular person, he settles down and establishes himself in that person’s heart. He then continually invites him towards building the house, beautifying its roofs and walls, expanding it, etc. He also invites him towards beautifying himself with clothing and animals. He causes the person to undergo losses throughout his life in fulfilling all these demands. Once he gets him involved in all this, he does not have to go that person a second time because these very demands [and desires] lead him to fulfil other demands. This continues till his death. He thus dies in the path of Satan and in following his desires. An evil destiny is thus feared from all this. We seek refuge in Allâh

I stared through the front door at Barrons Books and Baubles, uncertain what surprised me more: that the front seating cozy was intact or that Barrons was sitting there, boots propped on a table, surrounded by piles of books, hand-drawn maps tacked to the walls. I couldn’t count how many nights I’d sat in exactly the same place and position, digging through books for answers, occasionally staring out the windows at the Dublin night, and waiting for him to appear. I liked to think he was waiting for me to show. I leaned closer, staring in through the glass. He’d refurnished the bookstore. How long had I been gone? There was my magazine rack, my cashier’s counter, a new old-fashioned cash register, a small flat-screen TV/DVD player that was actually from this decade, and a sound dock for my iPod. There was a new sleek black iPod Nano in the dock. He’d done more than refurnish the place. He might as well have put a mat out that said WELCOME HOME, MAC. A bell tinkled as I stepped inside. His head whipped around and he half-stood, books sliding to the floor. The last time I’d seen him, he was dead. I stood in the doorway, forgetting to breathe, watching him unfold from the couch in a ripple of animal grace. He crammed the four-story room full, dwarfed it with his presence. For a moment neither of us spoke. Leave it to Barrons—the world melts down and he’s still dressed like a wealthy business tycoon. His suit was exquisite, his shirt crisp, tie intricately patterned and tastefully muted. Silver glinted at his wrist, that familiar wide cuff decorated with ancient Celtic designs he and Ryodan both wore. Even with all my problems, my knees still went weak. I was suddenly back in that basement. My hands were tied to the bed. He was between my legs but wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He used his mouth, then rubbed himself against my clitoris and barely pushed inside me before pulling out, then his mouth, then him, over and over, watching my eyes the whole time, staring down at me. What am I, Mac? he’d say. My world, I’d purr, and mean it. And I was afraid that, even now that I wasn’t Pri-ya, I’d be just as out of control in bed with him as I was then. I’d melt, I’d purr, I’d hand him my heart. And I would have no excuse, nothing to blame it on. And if he got up and walked away from me and never came back to my bed, I would never recover. I’d keeping waiting for a man like him, and there were no other men like him. I’d have to die old and alone, with the greatest sex of my life a painful memory. So, you’re alive, his dark eyes said. Pisses me off, the wondering. Do something about that. Like what? Can’t all be like you, Barrons. His eyes suddenly rushed with shadows and I couldn’t make out a single word. Impatience, anger, something ancient and ruthless. Cold eyes regarded me with calculation, as if weighing things against each other, meditating—a word Daddy used to point out was the larger part of premeditation. He’d say, Baby, once you start thinking about it, you’re working your way toward it. Was there something Barrons was working his way toward doing? I shivered.

Laura stands, in another photograph, wearing a two-piece gown, bodice and skirt, from centuries ago. The scarlet material is trimmed in gold brocade. From her waist the skirt billows outward, broad as a spinnaker, and grazes the floor in a huge circle. It fastens in front by a series of cobalt buttons, and she is about to start closing it, but for the moment it gapes open: a vertical window, eight or ten inches wide, runs from her waist to the floor. The gold brocade lines the opening like a ceremonial decoration, a veneration of what lies within. But nothing lies within. Inside the vast regal tent of the garment is darkness. Because of the lighting and pose, Laura’s body seems to end at the belly, to have no stumps at all. The opening exposes a pure emptiness. It is unclear how she is standing, what keeps her upright. The cavern beneath the skirt is illumined just enough to suggest that she isn’t wearing her prosthetics. She stands on no legs, suspended, magical. And that magic, along with her strong jawline turned in profile, endows her with omnipotence. The cavern is at once a universe and a womb. The vertical opening is a vaginal slit, and to slip through it, to slide the body inside the scarlet walls of the tent, to wait inside while she fastens the skirt and encloses you, swallows you, would be to live out the primal fantasy of entering the vagina not only with the penis but with everything from the skull to the toes: to be ensconced, to be consumed. The photograph’s viewer, not its subject, is at risk of disintegrating, coming apart, deliquescing in the lightless world he has longed for, turning to liquid in the womb. Laura, with her half-body, will remain more than intact, more than whole.

Under his master’s watchful eye, the boy crossed to the door, which was made of a dark, unpainted wood with many whorls and grains. He had to struggle to turn the heavy brass knob, but the coolness of its touch pleased him. The door swung open soundlessly on oiled hinges and the boy stepped through to find himself at the top of a carpeted staircase. The walls were elegantly papered with a flowery pattern. A small window halfway down let in a friendly stream of sunlight. The boy descended carefully, one step at a time. The silence and sunlight reassured him and quelled some of his fears. Never having been beyond this point before, he had nothing but nursery stories to furnish his ideas of what might be waiting in his master’s study. Terrible images of stuffed crocodiles and bottled eyeballs sprang garishly into his mind. Furiously he drove them out again. He would not be afraid. At the foot of the staircase was another door, similar to the first, but smaller and decorated, in its center, with a five-sided star painted in red. The boy turned the knob and pushed: the door opened reluctantly, sticking on the thick carpet. When the gap was wide enough the boy passed through into the study. Unconsciously he had held his breath as he entered; now he let it out again, almost with a sense of disappointment. It was all so ordinary. A long room lined with books on either side. At the far end a great wooden desk with a padded leather chair set behind it. Pens on the table, a few papers, an old computer, a small metal box. The window beyond looked out toward a horse chestnut tree adorned with the full splendor of summer. The light in the room had a sweet greenish tint. The boy made for the table. Halfway there, he stopped and looked behind him.

What if—” I stopped, swallowing hard. Nope. I couldn’t even say it aloud. We’d figure something else out because we had to. Time for a subject change before I lost it. “What did your mom say?” “Mostly that she thinks my hair is getting too long and I should cut it.” “That’s not helpful.” “That’s my mom for you.” He was trying for humor but his voice caught, and I wondered if he was thinking about how if she left and he didn’t, he’d never ever see her again. “So,” I said, sitting on the floor against the wall as close to the kitchen doorway as I could get without Lend dropping like a rock, “do you want your Christmas present?” “You got me something?” He sounded surprised. “I’ve been working on it for a while.” “I, uh, didn’t find you anything yet. I was actually setting up for your party, not Christmas shopping like I said.” “Being kidnapped by the Dark Queen and then cursed gets you off the hook for a lot. Besides, my birthday party totally counted.” “This isn’t how I wanted our first Christmas to go. We were going to go all out, pick out a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, decorate it, watch cheesy holiday movies, drink hot chocolate, let my dad make his eggnog and then complain about how disgusting it was, then I was going to deck out my entire room in mistletoe . . .” “Wait, you mean you didn’t plan for us to be stuck in different rooms for the holidays?” “Well, that part’s kind of nice.” I heard his head bang against the wall where he was sitting right on the other side of it from me. “I mean, who wants to actually be able to touch their super hot girlfriend? Overrated.” “I know, right?” I tried to laugh, but it came out choked. I swallowed, forcing my one to come out light. “And I totally dig watching people sleep. It’s so sexy.

The joint was divided almost evenly between dining area and bar. The smoke-filled bar was jammed nearly full while the restaurant was largely empty. In both sections, railroad memorabilia—from fading pictures and travel posters to crossing signs—decorated every inch of available wall space. A platform, dropped from the ceiling, ran around the outside of the room and supported the tracks for several running electric trains that hummed overhead at odd intervals.

like a samurai Jackson Pollock, I scream through my mask and thrash the disgusting little buggers into tinier flying sky-serpents that merrily decorate me, and the canvas on the walls.

There I was, standing on a cold marble floor in a long room and staring at white walls lined with the names of the donors who had contributed to building the library. I was starting to get nervous. What’s going on? Did they forget about me? Suddenly, a huge line of serious-looking Secret Service men with radios in their ears and an attitude that showed they were all-business came into the room. A moment later, I realized why, as they were followed by all five living Presidents and their wives. Barack Obama. Bill Clinton. George Bush. Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush. I froze against the wall like a mannequin. I tried to will myself to be invisible and not get in anyone’s way. George W. Bush, in a black suit and blue-checkered tie, spotted me and caught my eye. I saw him glance down at my prosthetic leg decorated with the American flag as he waved at me and interrupted the conversations going on around him. “Let me introduce you to my friend, Melissa,” he said. All of the Presidents and their wives came over and circled around me. The Secret Service formed a half-circle ring behind them. I was introduced to everybody, one by one. President Bush told everyone about me and my story, and how we had met during the ride at his ranch. I was almost speechless as I managed to say, “Nice to meet you, Mister President,” over and over. I felt like I was in a dream. As the circle dispersed to get back to preparing for the event, President Obama paused to ask me how my life in Chicago was going and about the progress of Dare2Tri. I had no idea how he knew about these things, but we spoke, just the two of us, for a few minutes. “I’m proud of you,” he finally said, getting one of his presidential coins out of his pocket as a gift. President Bush was standing close by, and he put his arm around me as he cracked a joke to put everyone at ease. I noticed Condoleezza Rice had come in and was standing on the opposite end of the room practicing pronouncing the names of all the foreign dignitaries in attendance. It had to be the most surreal moment of my life. I felt like I was exuding pure patriotism, just being in that room with those people. On that day, political views didn’t matter—what was important was that several of our country’s leaders had come together to honor one of their peers, and, by extension, America itself. I had never been prouder to be American.

So did you make everything in here, or it is just for decoration?” the girl asked as she pointed behind me to some of the displays on the wall. I looked behind me to see what she referred to. Along this wall were some of the shields and breastplates I’d made. Stuck in the spaces around the prominent pieces were assorted horseshoes, a couple of daggers, a single boar’s spear, and some spurs. While the living museum mainly focused on the early pioneer days of American into the turn of the century, they approved the display of different types of armor and weapons throughout the ages. They thought having a few weapons up there would intrigue the children. But if the class from yesterday was any indication, it was difficult to get them focused on anything other than the live animals. “Oh no, I made those,” I replied with a little pride in my voice. “I made everything on display here. Well, except for him.” I pointed to the deer head over the door. “I had nothing to do with that.

But the one that really spoke to me was the Temple of Mars Ultor. I mean,who wouldn't dig that red marble crypt with its cast-iron doors? And, inside, that massive statue of the Avenger (no, not one of those Avengers), his scarred face scowling and his spear raised as if to strike whoever dares to enter. Let's not forget the display wall of human skulls and assorted weapons, from the kind that slice and dice to the kind that leave bullet-shaped holes. Even the ceiling pays tribute, with eleven identical and bizarre-looking shields that form the letter M. That military man-cave - sorry, god-crypt was built to intimidate, but the decor was so over-the-top that I broke into giggles while looking at it. I got out of there before I lost control, though. I'm not stupid enough to risk insulting the war god.

A sofa should not take up more than two-thirds of the wall it sits against. Anything more than that and the room will feel overfurnished.

It’s okay,” Dee Dee said in the soothing voice of something still confusingly celestial. “Just stay still.” He glanced past her as he swam back to full consciousness. Yep, he was still in the cult compound. The decor in the room was closer to nonexistent than austere. Nothing on the walls, no furniture in view. The walls were that same inescapable gray.

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The house is immaculate and boring as fuck. White walls, white floors, white decor. I mean, there’s a slight gray to some of it, but for the most part, it’s all white. It’s the kind of place I’d be too scared to sneeze in on the off chance I accidentally shit myself in the process.

Sexism, and its expressions, are multi-layered and complex. Often, it comes in gender-neutral language, decorated with gendered accents. It comes in the form of pink walls for young girls and blue for young boys. Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe’s. Skirts and dresses and Bermuda shorts. Fairy tales that shamelessly teach that women need a Prince Charming and superheroes who are almost always men. That boys don’t cry. It comes in the form of ‘protective’ mothers and fathers who don’t allow their daughters to date, while the son has many girlfriends. Or in the idea that while a woman may be doing well for herself, she must marry a man who does better than her or marry at all! And the over-glorification of motherhood that carefully cloaks the sacrifices a woman makes to raise a child and systematically alienates the man — the father. There is sexism everywhere if you stop and pay attention.

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They weren’t really what we should have chosen anyway,” we consoled each other. The Colonel had liked crimson with black lines better than anything, but we couldn’t make out on what basis he had chosen brown cabbages or pale-grey disembodied leaves for the rest of the walls. We decided that he must have sent for countless books of samples and gone through them, carefully choosing only the ones that he could be certain no one else could possibly select. At that time it was forbidden by law to spend any money on re-decorating a house.

My dear," he admonished her when she brought up the fact that she might, in the future, go back to work as a lawyer, "how do you expect to do two jobs?"... "You already have a job," he explained. "From now on, your life with your husband is your job." He corrected himself. "It's more than a job. It's a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it's going to take effort. You'll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You'll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You'll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You'll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you'll have your hair colored twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You'll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you'll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you'll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You'll need to have your hair and makeup done. You'll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organize, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So," Billy concluded, "let's get busy.

Beauty is more than just pictures on a wall. It is also about colors that bring pleasure, smooth and nubby textures that reward the touch, the wafting fragrance of food in the oven that keeps us sniffing appreciatively, the comfort or excitement of music on the stereo. Beauty is found in the way we light the rooms (we keep a well-stocked shelf of candles and lighters in constant use), the books we open again and again, the way we arrange the furniture and set the table. It is found in natural objects we use for decorating potted plants, shells, autumn leaves, always fresh flowers or pine boughs brought in from our yard and open windows that draw the eye toward the beautiful outdoors.

I am so done with that arrogant, know-it-all, suffocating asshole hanging all over me!” she rages, throwing a decorative cushion at the wall. “If he offers to run through my testimony one more time, I’m going to stick his eyeballs on cocktail sticks and serve them for dinner.

appeared on the surrounding wall,15 while red, white, and black mosaic diamond shapes decorated the walls

the new york headquarters of the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton occupy ten floors of a sleek black office tower that stands in a grove of skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan. Founded in 1931 by a pair of blue-blooded attorneys who defected from a venerable Wall Street firm, Debevoise became venerable itself, expanding, over the decades, into a global juggernaut with eight hundred lawyers, a roster of blue-chip clients, and nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. The midtown offices bear no trace of the oak-and-leather origins of the firm. Instead, they are decorated in the banal tones of any contemporary corporate office, with carpeted hallways, fishbowl conference rooms, and standing desks. In the twentieth century, power announced itself. In the twenty-first, the surest way to spot real power is by its understatement.

In a short while we drew up in front of Karnak Hall, a modest exhibition facility of some antiquity in a street just off Leicester Square. The Hall had been built in the style of its namesake temple, the edifice set with a series of recesses, each featuring a great statue of Ramses in a different pose. The rest of the façade was painted terra-cotta to resemble the walls of the temple and decorated with fanciful Egyptological friezes. We passed between the legs of one of the Ramses to enter, and I resisted the urge to look up.

Matt’s Creation Room was a wide, colorful space dedicated to music. The walls were splashed with bright orange paint, green sofas, and cushions, which contrasted with the serious, dark upright Yamaha piano in the center of the room. There were other instruments in the room: several guitars, a violin, several drums, a bass guitar. The walls were like a private Hall of Fame covered with posters and even relics of famous singers. One wall was covered with pictures of Matt and his three platinum albums Matt, Superstar, and Moving On. The room was bathed in light entering through the wide windows. It was Matt’s Creation Room and he had obviously decorated the room according to his own tastes. After finishing her scales while waiting for Matt, she posted herself next to the windows to practice her audition song for La Cenerentola that Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, sorrowful song that Cinderella sang in the first scene about a king who looked for true love not in splendor and beauty, but in innocence and goodness.

The street was very narrow, paved with the same shades of color as the faded cinnamon-brown buildings that darkened the street with their shade. It was like an alley. Many red flags decorated the walls, spaced a few meters apart, flapping in the wind that whistled in the narrow alley. There were a lot of people, and the foot traffic slowed our progress. 'A little further,' Olivia encouraged me; I was clinging to the doorknob, ready to throw myself in the street as soon as she said the word.

The street was very narrow, cobbled with the same color tones as the faded cinnamon-brown buildings that darkened the street with their shade. It had the feel of an alleyway. Many red flags decorated the walls, spaced only a few yards apart, flapping in the wind that whistled through the narrow lane. It was crowded, and the foot traffic slowed our progress. ‘Just a little farther,’ Olivia encouraged me; I was gripping the door handle, ready to throw myself into the street as soon as she spoke the word. She drove in quick spurts and sudden stops, and the people in the crowd shook their fists at us and said angry words that I was glad I could not understand. She turned onto the little path that could not have been meant for cars; shocked people had to squeeze into doorways as we scraped by. We found another street at the end. The buildings were taller here; they leaned together overhead so that no sunlight touched the pavement- the thrashing red flags on either side nearly met. The crowd was thicker here than anywhere else. Olivia stopped the car. I had the door open before we were at a standstill. She pointed to where the street widened into a patch of bright openness. ‘There were at the southern end of the square. Run straight across, to the right of the clock tower. I'll find a way around-’ Her breath caught suddenly, and when she spoke again, her voice was a hiss. ‘They're everywhere?’ I froze in place, All the same, and all, she pushed me out of the car. ‘Forget about them. You have two minutes. Go, Bell, go!’ she shouted, climbing out of the car as she spoke. I did not pause to watch Olivia melt into the shadows. I did not stop to close my door behind me. I shoved a heavy woman out of my way and ran flat out, head down, paying little attention to anything All the same and all, the uneven stones beneath my feet.

While he disappeared into the kitchen, Petro’s gaze rose as he took in the moonlit ceiling that stretched up to the second and third floors. Crossed oars and old life buoys decorated the walls. Nets and spears and shelves with the occasional ship in a bottle. High above, an old helm hung from tasteful chains, repurposed into a chandelier.

step: In silence both raised their left arms in a kind of salute and passed straight through, as though the dark metal were smoke. The yew hedges muffled the sound of the men’s footsteps. There was a rustle somewhere to their right: Yaxley drew his wand again, pointing it over his companion’s head, but the source of the noise proved to be nothing more than a pure-white peacock, strutting majestically along the top of the hedge. “He always did himself well, Lucius. Peacocks . . .” Yaxley thrust his wand back under his cloak with a snort. A handsome manor house grew out of the darkness at the end of the straight drive, lights glinting in the diamond-paned downstairs windows. Somewhere in the dark garden beyond the hedge a fountain was playing. Gravel crackled beneath their feet as Snape and Yaxley sped toward the front door, which swung inward at their approach, though nobody had visibly opened it. The hallway was large, dimly lit, and sumptuously decorated, with a magnificent carpet covering most of the stone floor. The eyes of the pale-faced portraits on the walls followed Snape and Yaxley as they strode past. The two men halted at a heavy wooden door leading into the next room, hesitated for the space of a heartbeat, then Snape turned the bronze handle. The drawing room was full of silent people, sitting at a long and ornate table. The room’s usual furniture had been pushed carelessly up against the walls. Illumination came from a roaring fire beneath a handsome marble mantelpiece surmounted by a gilded mirror. Snape and Yaxley lingered for a moment on the threshold. As their eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, they were drawn upward to the strangest feature of the scene: an apparently unconscious human figure hanging upside down over the table, revolving slowly as if suspended by an invisible rope, and reflected in the mirror and in the bare, polished surface of the table below. None of the people seated underneath this singular sight was looking at it except for a

In another minute, we were seated in the low-ceilinged living room, furnished and decorated in a style I had not seen or even suspected before. Nothing in sight matched anything else—wicker chair, bamboo settee, chair and table of dark heavy wood ... paintings and masks and a couple of tapestries on the walls ... idols and figurines, a wooden spear straight as a long arrow next to a shield that could have been made from elephant hide ... an old flintlock and a modern high-powered scope-equipped rifle leaning aslant in one corner ... a hammered brass water pipe... Jumble of shapes, kaleidoscope of colors, but it all seemed to take on a kind of harmonious clutter after I looked at it for a while.

I argued with him, but not much—it was his house—and that’s where we left it. In another minute, we were seated in the low-ceilinged living room, furnished and decorated in a style I had not seen or even suspected before. Nothing in sight matched anything else—wicker chair, bamboo settee, chair and table of dark heavy wood ... paintings and masks and a couple of tapestries on the walls ... idols and figurines, a wooden spear straight as a long arrow next to a shield that could have been made from elephant hide ... an old flintlock and a modern high-powered scope-equipped rifle leaning aslant in one corner ... a hammered brass water pipe... Jumble of shapes, kaleidoscope of colors, but it all seemed to take on a kind of harmonious clutter after I looked at it for a while.

Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patroling policeman keeps reminding me that people are not out to help each other. But when my eyes wander over the walls of the train covered with invitations to buy more or new products, I see young, beautiful people enjoying each other in a gentle embrace, playful men and women smiling at each other in fast sailboats, proud explorers on horseback encouraging each other to take brave risks, fearless children dancing on a sunny beach, and charming girls always ready to serve me in airplanes and ocean liners. While the subway train runs from one dark tunnel into the other and I am nervously aware where I keep my money, the words and images decorating my fearful world speak about love, gentleness, tenderness and a joyful togetherness of spontaneous people.

Home is where the heart paints its stories on the walls, decorating every corner with memories, while books whisper timeless tales, inviting us to explore the colorful landscapes of imagination.

Do you want to know what happens to the women who don’t bleed?” Bradley was still holding me, but I had tilted my head away from his chest to look into his eyes. I shook my head, too afraid to ask. “They end up on Ian Ivory’s office wall.” Sucking in a breath, I stumbled back as my lips parted in shock. “That decorative wall behind his desk you’ve been dusting off are the bones of all the women who didn’t bleed on their wedding night. The Ivory family loses so much money if that happens.

Tucking into the bite-sized pie decorated with the orange carrot flower, her eyes widened at how delicious the braised new onions and carrots were, the cumin perfectly drawing out their sweetness. The main dish of lamb, cut from the bone as soon as it was placed on the table, was so glorious to behold that it made her heart race. Protected by its wall of sweet breadcrumbs, orange peel and fresh coriander, the meat had the robust smell of a grassy plain. The strawberry mousse served as dessert, brought out after the hard rich orange cheese that reminded her of dried mullet roe, was fluffy and soft, sweet yet tart. For the first time this year, Rika felt that the season when all the flowers would come into bloom was at arm's reach.

The carved spirals and flutes of the massive columns, and the incised chevrons that decorated the arches between them, had once been painted and gilded; but now all that remained were a few flakes of papery gold leaf and a patchwork of stains where the paint had been. The mortar between the stones was crumbling and falling out, and gathering in little heaps by the walls. Philip felt the familiar anger rise in him again. When people came here they were supposed to be awestruck by the majesty of Almighty God. But peasants were simple people who judged by appearances, and coming here they would think that God was a careless, indifferent deity unlikely to appreciate their worship or take note of their sins.

to be discovered during the initial excavation of Knossos was the so-called Throne Room. It was a modestly-sized room, but what was so special about it was the gypsum throne built into the north wall. The throne had a high back and was surrounded by stone benches on either side. Opposite the throne were steps down to a recessed area, most likely a type of bathtub or water tank. Sir Arthur Evans, who oversaw the initial excavation, believed it was used for ritual purification, although a lack of drainage calls that interpretation into question. Some modern scholars believe it may have been an aquarium, water storage container, or even a menstrual pit. The walls behind the throne were decorated with what is known as the Griffin Fresco. It depicted two recumbent—lying down—griffins facing the throne with one on either side of it. Griffins were considered important mythological creatures, and they were often depicted attending a deity. Behind the griffins was a landscape in

The next morning, I opened a red-painted door and saw a little room with bookshelves lining its whitewashed walls. In the center of the room sat a round lion-footed table, on which a fat old codex lay open; on the far wall, between a gap in the bookcases, a life-sized bas-relief of the Muse Clio stared at me, her scrolls clasped to her chest, her blind white eyes all-knowing. It was a library. At first I thought it was very small, but when I stepped inside I saw a doorway leading to another room of books, which itself opened on two more. It was a honeycomb of rooms, their walls covered in bookshelves, reliefs of the Muses peering from occasional alcoves.

You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.

The style in which libraries were decorated had been standard since the Middle Ages. Raphael would have been familiar with the scheme from, among other examples, Federigo da Montefeltro’s library in Urbino. Each of the four subjects into which the books were divided—theology, philosophy, justice, and medicine—were represented by an allegorical female figure on the wall or ceiling. The painter usually also added portraits of men and women who had won acclaim in these particular fields.

Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colours, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of one of them on the top shelf, between old woven baskets and Christmas decorations.

A bell chimes as I open the door. It's even more magical inside than out. Spools of ribbon hang from the walls like the atelier of a fairy queen. Tiny jasmine buds lace through the curls of a crystal chandelier. Dresses fill the curves of antique wardrobes, as if this were a princess's closet and not a store. A group of girls squeal as they browse the gowns. They've dressed almost otherworldly, so unlike the yoga pants and sweatshirts I'm used to in San Francisco. Instead, they're ornamented in seafoam trousers made of silk, lace corsets with ruffles across the bustier, satin slips with rose embroidery. They wear seashells in their hair and around their necks--- an iridescent mollusk held together by a string of pearls, an abalone claw clip that flashes different colors beneath the light, pukas threaded between pastel sea glass.

Neon signs illuminate the windows and old license plates decorate the walls, along with paper bills of various currencies and the occasional signed sports jersey. I only recognize one—Jasper Gervais, a famous hockey player.

Rachael had to keep her reaction in check when they went to Leslie’s home, which, not surprisingly, was something she would later describe as an aquamarine palace. Everything was beautiful like a beach house filled with calming colors of sand with aqua and translucent greens. All the furniture was large, light colored, and overstuffed. The walls were whitewashed and reminiscent of a beach bungalow at a five-star resort. It had been decorated with a calming theme in mind.

Whitewash, a solution of lime and chalk mixed with other additives, was brushed on interior and exterior walls like paint. It took several days to set, forming a white surface that could be coloured with other substances; in some areas animal blood or vegetable dye was added to give exterior walls a pink colour. Whitewash was a cheap way of decorating rooms. More expensive options included textile hangings, wallpaper, painting and wainscoting. In 1817 William Holland was decorating parts of the vicarage at Over Stowey. His daughter’s bedroom had wallpaper, but he hired a painter for some of the woodwork, inside and out:

With a pair of scissors in my pocket, a bottle of rum in my hand, and Martina, we walked towards Plaza Trippy to go to the alley behind it called Carrer de la Rosa. Martina didn't know what this was all about; I tried to make it a surprise. At the gate, I asked Martina to hold the scissors until I climbed up the wall of the building and cut off the sign. I never had the chance to tell her that I used to do indoor climbing. Just like Adam. It was so dusty and rusty, abandoned and old, that I got dirty. The sign was quite new, or at least it looked new, but it was dustier than I had thought - it must have been up there for years. I cut the zip ties on the four corners, holding the sign to the old metal railings and then I jumped down from the wall to jump into Martina's arms in the tight alley. We were laughing. We went up and left, and up and right a few blocks until we crossed Ferran Street, I think, and finally, I thought we were safe: let's take a picture of the sign and get rid of it. I didn’t want anyone to see us in front of the place or on the busy Carrer Escudellers taking a picture of the 'For Sale' sign. Only Martina knew that we were going to have a club and that it would be right there. I gave my iPhone to Martina to take a picture of me holding the sign. I was so happy. I had my new girlfriend, suddenly from the sky, and she seemed to be “The One”. Celestial. I was wearing my beige suede Adidas shoes with white sole which Sabrina had surprised me with a year earlier on my birthday, my dark green Globe pants, and my black Breach jacket, a black hoodie, smiling ear to ear while holding a dirty sign in front of a store's closed metal shutter decorated with graffiti. After throwing out the sign in the trash can with Martina, I sent Adam the picture. He replied late at night: „:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD” Finally, it took a year to make Adam happy, even though Sabrina wouldn't let me make her happy. I got the place to make 'Aso Golan', the only place it could ever take place; to be one of the largest coffeeshops in Barcelona. I knew it would take another year to quickly fix up the place and pass the inspection before we could open it. I knew that in few years, we would be rich, looking back to the day I made my first order at the Sagrada Familia. Or the night we took off the FOR SALE sign with Martina.

(1) The Mindset of Strategy and Positioning (心持ちの事　付　座之次第) ◎ With regards to mindset as you engage in a contest, be calmer than normal and try to see into your opponent’s mind. The enemy whose voice becomes higher in pitch, eyes widen, face reddens, muscles bulge and face grimaces is basically incompetent and will [clumsily] hit through to the ground. When faced with a [second-rate] adversary such as this, maintain serenity of mind and observe his face dispassionately so as not to provoke him. Then, taking hold of your sword, smile and assume a position lower than the upper stance (jōdan). Coolly evade his blow as he tries to attack you. When the enemy appears somewhat perturbed by your unusual attitude, this is the time to strike. Also, if your opponent is quiet, eyes narrowed, body at ease, and he is holding his sword in a relaxed manner as if his fingers are floating on the hilt, assume that he is an expert. Do not saunter carelessly into his range. You must seize the initiative and assail him skillfully, driving him back and striking in quick succession. If you are nonchalant with such a competent opponent, he will force you back. It is crucial to ascertain how capable your enemy is. In terms of where you should position yourself, the same conditions apply in both spacious or cramped locations. Step in so that walls will not impede your sword swings from either side. Take an approximate stance with the long sword and nimbly close in on your foe. If your sword should collide with some barrier, the enemy will become emboldened and will hem you in. If your sword looks as if it might scrape the ceiling, determine the actual height with the tip and be mindful thereafter. You can employ either sword for this, as long as it is the one that cannot be used [in attack while you do this]. Keep the light behind you. With your usual training, be prepared to freely apply any kind of technique with a relaxed mind, but always execute with urgency. It is important to adapt according to the circumstances. (2) About Gaze (目付之事) ◎ Direct your eyes on the enemy’s face. Do not focus on anything else. Since the mind is projected in [facial] expressions, there is no place more revealing than the face to fix one’s gaze. The way of observing the enemy’s face is the same as looking through the mist at trees and rocks on an island two and a half miles [4 km] in the distance. It is the same as peering at [and identifying] birds perched atop a shanty 100 yards [91 meters] away through the falling sleet. It is also akin to beholding a decorative wooden board used to cover the ridge and purlin ends of a roof gable or the tiles on a hut. Calmly focus your gaze [to take everything in].

The décor was the perfect contrast to the club's existing dark wood walls and coffered ceilings. Cedric's team used accents of gold to tie in with the space, but lightened things up with oodles of ivory and blush flowers. They highlighted the massive arched window overlooking the twinkling lights of downtown by flanking it with two equally massive blooming dogwood trees. Where he found blooming dogwoods this time of year in Dallas was a mystery, but that was all part of his magic. Dining tables were draped in champagne-colored velvet linen, and atop every table was an ivory urn overflowing with blush antique garden roses. They reminded me of the roses that grew in our garden at home, which was certainly on purpose. Twinkling candles in glass sleeves covered every surface, and next to the bar stood a sparkling tower of champagne glasses.

Small Changes, Big Impact: Decor Ideas for Your Home - The theory of small changes and their significant impact holds true when it comes to interior design Little things such as adding rugs, changing curtains, and decorating walls can bring functionality, comfort, and aesthetic beauty to your space.

when I say love, I mean I wait at the door for you to arrive; I mean the walls of my chest are decorated with your pictures; I mean it's safe here

journey he headed directly to it, leaving his tunnel behind him and stopping only when the thinnest film of bark separated the tunnel from the outdoors. Then the larva backs up. Having moved an appropriate distance from the exit, he proceeds to hollow out a chamber not his size but large enough to accommodate the beetle who does not yet exist. The larva’s brush with destiny, however, is not yet done. He seals the chamber at either end with a natural cement produced in his stomach. Now, with doors neatly closed, he rasps down the walls of his sealed chamber to cover the floor with a soft down. Using the same wood-wool, he completes the decor by felting all walls a millimeter thick. Now at last his preparations for the accouchement are finished and he lies down and sheds his skin, becoming a pupa which in turn will become a beetle. But the wonders of instinct have not yet been finally recorded. He lies down always with his head toward the exit. Were he to lie down the wrong way,

If a traveller was to feel personally involved with (rather than guiltily obedient towards) 'the walls and ceilings of the church decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings...', he or she would have to be able to connect these facts--as boring as a fly--with one of the large, blunt questions to which genuine curiosity must be anchored.

he withdrew his gun and blew Harry's head apart with one shot. Blood, brains, and gore spurted in clumps in all directions. Without pausing a beat, Raymond put the gun in his mouth and blew his brains out the back of his head. More blood, brains, and gore decorated the wall, the floor, and the ceiling. It also ran down the lens of Bennie’s camera and part of his face.

Art and the party were aligned for the next 40 years. Art for art’s sake ceased to exist. Artists had little choice but to produce propaganda. Mao-era posters were often striking with their muscular steelworkers and relentlessly cheerful peasants. They provided a rare spot of colour in otherwise grey lives; many people decorated their walls with such images (unintentionally, the paper also proved useful as insulation).

Not many Ruminarii warships had ever been captured intact by any enemy, and so for those the Ruminarii “invited” aboard their vessels, this was usually a one-way sight-seeing trip. For those who really want to know, Ruminarii Hammerheads have an extensive corridor network, the interior walls are heavily decorated, savagely militaristic and inevitably, close together. He strode down one. Lesser ranks seeing him, fell to the deck and groveled like their fingernails depended on it. There was a chorus of shrieks and whimpers as he passed. When he arrived on the bridge, everyone was face down on the deck, each endeavoring to grovel lower than the next. Nothing like discipline to keep the crew in its place.

Before either men could commence a deliberation over who knew more of the hotel’s history, Coraline injected, “India was writing the last chapters of its saga of independence when The Imperial opened its doors in the 1930s.” She paused before proceeding, “Pandit Nehru, Mahatama Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten met under congenial conditions to discuss the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan on the very ground we stand on. Adding to that, the Nehru family also had a permanent suite within the walls of this ‘Maiden of the East.’” She let out a discreet chuckle that I think only I caught. Both men stared at the female, not knowing how to respond. Before either one of them could opine, she continued, “If only walls could speak. Here indeed is a repository of fascinating anecdotal material for authors of romantic and detective fiction. It was here, at this very site, that one could clink glasses for the Royals to their war efforts, urge Gandhi to quit the India movement, or dance to the strains of Blue Danube, belly dance like a belle from Beirut or be serenaded by an orchestra from London.” The group of us stared at the big sister, wondering how in the world she knew so much about The Imperial. My teacher and Jabril pressed for affirmation. Instead, she vociferated, “Notably, The Imperial has the largest collection on display of land war gallantry awards in India and among its neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Bhutan and China. It also holds a sizeable record of orders and decorations bestowed by the British Royalties to the Emperor of India as an honour to the local Maharajas, Sultans and ruling Princes from the various Indian states.” While Narnia’s chaperone continued her historical spiel, the recruit pulled me aside and whispered amusingly, “Although everything my big sister said is true, she’s having fun with you guys. Her information is from the hotel’s brochure in the guest rooms.” I quipped. “Why didn’t you tell the rest of our group? I thought she was an expert in India’s history!” She gave me a wet kiss and said saucily, “I’m telling you because I like you.” Stunned by her raciness, I was speechless. I couldn’t decide whether to tell her there and then that I was gay – but at that very moment, Andy appeared from around the corner. “Where did you two disappear to?” he inquired. When Narnia was out of earshot, I muttered knowingly to my BB, “I’ll tell you later.”, as we continued the art tour browsing portraitures of India’s Princely Rulers of yore.

center of the room. It was decorated in a white and blue trim comforter and more pillows than she’d ever seen. “Yes. They’re mood walls. They sense your need to relax, so they’ve adjusted to a color you find comforting. It seems white is

He raised the leather curtain and showed us into the next room. “Little study” is not how I would have described it; it was spacious, with walls of exquisite antique shelving crammed with handsomely bound books all of venerable age. What impressed me more than the books were some small glass cases filled with objects hard to identify—they looked like stones. And there were little animals, whether stuffed, mummified, or delicately reproduced I couldn’t say. Everything was bathed in a diffuse crepuscular light that came from a large double-mullioned window at the end, with leaded diamond panes of transparent amber. The light from the window blended with that of a great lamp on a dark mahogany table covered with papers. It was one of those lamps sometimes found on reading tables in old libraries, with a dome of green glass that could cast a white oval on the page while leaving the surroundings in an opalescent penumbra. This play of two sources of light, both unnatural, somehow enlivened the polychrome of the ceiling. The ceiling was vaulted, supported on all four sides by a decorative fiction: little brick-red columns with tiny gilded capitals. The many trompe l’oeil images, divided into seven areas, enhanced the effect of depth, and the whole room had the feeling of a mortuary chapel, impalpably sinful, melancholy, sensual.

The rest of the house had a casual California boho-beach vibe, with its distressed wood floors, ivory furniture, and gauzy curtains, but the bedroom was very Zen. Decorated in a cool palette of sage greens and charcoal grays, with a floor-to-ceiling window along one wall that looked over a tiny tranquility garden of stones and succulents, it was my little oasis.

The mythical Thunderbird, in one form or another, was held in awe by practically all of the Indian tribes. On the Great Plains, where the phenomena of thunderstorms was very striking, the Thunderbird was supposed to be a deity in the form of a bird of enormous size, which produced thunder by flapping its wings, and lightning by opening and closing its eyes. These great birds were thought to carry a lake of fresh water on their backs, which caused a great downpour when they flew through the air. Tribes of the Pacific Coast thought the Thunderbird caught whales during a thunderstorm and used its wings as a bow to shoot arrows. Each tribe interpreted the bird differently in its art, as shown on these two pages. The design of the Thunderbird was used to decorate war drums, pottery, and walls and was supposed to protect individuals and tribes from the Evil Spirits.

Hey!" I barked at the ghost. I had to maintain complete control over the situation and the ghost, or we were screwed. "Lovely establishment," he said with a note of sarcasm. As I got closer, I saw that he was dressed like an early 20th-century undertaker. His face was long and his ears kind of stuck out. His mouth pulled down at the corners in a perpetual frown. “I suppose this will do." "You can't stay here," I warned. "I will have you exorcised." "Horse shit," he countered. "I suggest you add some bookshelves to the walls and make a small library back here. This place could use a touch of class." Was I getting decorating advice from a ghost?

The temptation to adapt his mind was growing as he sought to decorate the walls of his life once more with a feminine presence; this time however Genesis decided he would be smarter, he'd diversify his exposure to the risk of heartbreak by adapting and reducing his levels of faithfulness and commitment.

A slave was cheaper than a mule. Slavery, despicable topic, rarely appeared in poetry or onstage or in the paintings that decorated urns and walls. Philosophers ignored it, except to confirm it as the natural fate of inferior beings, and to sound the alarm. Watch out, warned Plato. Slaves, he said, unavoidably hate their owners and only constant vigilance can keep them from murdering us all. And Aristotle maintained that military training for the citizenry was crucial, given the climate of insecurity.

An overwhelming urge and temptation to adapt his own mind was growing within Genesis as he sought to decorate the walls of his life once more with a feminine presence; this time however he decided in the game of love he would be smarter, he'd diversify his exposure to the risk of heartbreak by adapting and reducing his levels of faithfulness and commitment.

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

Mrs. Kelly wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and had a piece of tissue tucked in her sleeve. And the only decorations on the classroom walls were a poster that said READ and a chart showing how all the letters of the alphabet looked in cursive. “Now,

As Tommy had said, Richard behind his desk was impressive in a way she would never have expected possible. The head offices of this empire occupied four floors of an ancient and ugly building in the City. These offices were of course not where the actual business was done; but rather a showcase for the personalities of Richard and his associates. The decor was tactful and international. One would not have been surprised to see it anywhere in the world. From the moment one entered the great front door, the lift, corridors, waiting rooms, were a long but discreet preparation for the moment one finally entered Richard’s office. The floor was six inches deep in thick dark pile. The walls were of dark glass between white panels. It was lit unemphatically; and apparently from behind the various wall plants that trailed well-tended greenery from level to level. Richard, his sullen and obstinate body cancelled by anonymous suiting, sat behind a desk that looked like a tomb in greenish marble.

money untouched he inspected the left side. It looked like the nail head rusted just enough for the tin to pop off, but he decided to check behind anyway. He pulled the tin away from the wall and looked into the dimly lit space. To his surprise, something was there. He reached in and pulled out a large cardboard envelope. The envelope was a heavy one used to mail important documents and looked like it had been there for a while. It was addressed to Edward, but there was no return address. The top was open, so Adam reached inside. He pulled out a small stack of papers and pictures. The picture on top was of a group of people standing in front of Town Hall. It must have been the Grand Opening, because they were all dressed in formal clothes and there were decorations hanging in the background. If it was the Grand Opening, the picture was from 1910. He had learned the year it was built while on a class trip a few years before. The date was carved into a brick near the main entrance. Adam looked at the picture a little closer. Each of the people wore the same lapel pin as the one Edward wore in his portrait.

The large bedroom was crammed to overflowing with family relics, and examples of the various arts in which Lady Emily had brilliantly dabbled at one time or another. Part of one wall was decorated with a romantic landscape painted on the plaster, the fourpost bed was hung with her own skilful embroidery, watercolour drawings in which a touch of genius fought and worsted an entire want of technique hung on the walls. Pottery, woodcarving, enamels, all bore witness to their owner’s insatiable desire to create. From their earliest days the Leslie children had thought of their mother as doing or making something, handling brush, pencil, needle with equal enthusiasm, coming in late to lunch with clay in her hair, devastating the drawing-room with her far-flung painting materials, taking cumbersome pieces of embroidery on picnics, disgracing everyone by a determination to paint the village cricket pavilion with scenes from the life of St Francis for which she made the gardeners pose. What Mr Leslie thought no one actually knew, for Mr Leslie had his own ways of life and rarely interfered. Once only had he been known to make a protest. In the fever of an enamelling craze, Lady Emily had a furnace put up in the service-room, thus making it extremely difficult for Gudgeon and the footman to get past, and moreover pressing the footman as her assistant when he should have been laying lunch.

What in the—? My begonias!” he heard someone say behind him. Nick looked over his shoulder. A small but muscular woman in sweaty workout clothes was stepping out of a big shiny car in the neighbor’s driveway. She was gaping in horror at the chewed-up flowerbed and the smoking lawn mower. Scowling, she turned toward Uncle Newt’s house. And the scowl didn’t go away when she noticed Nick looking back at her. In fact, it got scowlier. Nick smiled weakly, waved, and hurried into the house. He closed the door behind him. “Whoa,” he said when his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside. Cluttering the long hall in front of him were dozens of old computers, a telescope, a metal detector connected to a pair of bulky earphones, an old-fashioned diving suit complete with brass helmet, a stuffed polar bear (the real, dead kind), a chainsaw, something that looked like a flamethrower (but couldn’t be … right?), a box marked KEEP REFRIGERATED, another marked THIS END UP (upside down), and a fully lit Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made from broken beakers and test tubes (it was June). Exposed wires and power cables poked out of the plaster and veered off around every corner, and there were so many diplomas and science prizes and patents hanging (all of them earned by Newton Galileo Holt, a.k.a. Uncle Newt) that barely an inch of wall was left uncovered. Off to the left was a living room lined with enough books to put some libraries to shame, a semitransparent couch made of inflated plastic bags, and a wide-screen TV connected by frayed cords to a small trampoline.

He smiled – a real smile. Damn. It was easier to deal with him when he was being thoroughly vile. "Look, I’m sorry for being so rude earlier today. Your presence came as something of a shock and I reacted badly." "Oh." Geared for battle, his apology took me utterly by surprise. I gaped. "Aunt Arabella spoke very highly of you," he added, heaping coals of fire on my head. "She was impressed by your work on the Purple Gentian." "Why all this sudden amiability?" I asked suspiciously, crossing my arms across my chest. "Are you always this blunt?" "I’m too tired to be tactful," I said honestly. "Fair enough." Stretching, Colin detached himself from the wall. "Can I make you some hot chocolate as a token of peace? I was just about to have some myself," he added. Suiting action to words, he loped over to the counter beside the sink and checked the level of water in a battered brown plastic electric kettle. Satisfied, he plugged it into the wall, flipping the red switch on the side. I followed him over to the counter, the linen folds of the nightgown trailing after me across the linoleum. "As long as you promise not to slip any arsenic in it." Colin rooted around in a cupboard above the sink for the cocoa tin and held it out to me to sniff. "See? Arsenic free." I leant back against the counter, my elbows behind me on the marble work surface. "I don’t think arsenic is supposed to have a smell, is it?" "Damn, foiled again." Colin spooned Cadbury’s instant hot chocolate into two mugs, one decorated with large purple flowers, and the other with a quotation that I thought might be Jane Austen, but the author’s name was hidden around the other side of the mug. "Look, if it makes you feel better, I promise to do a very bad job hiding your body." "In that case, carry on," I yawned.