Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The sense of realism was so intense that the painting effortlessly achieved the effect sought by the old Flemish masters: the integration of the spectator into the pictorial whole, persuading him that the space in which he stood was the same as that represented in the painting, as if the picture were a fragment of reality, or reality a fragment of the picture.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories

KANAI SPOTTED HER the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair nor by her clothes