Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“The beauty of realization is a beauty that always takes more time to show itself as beauty than pure beauty does…it is only beauty when the things that follow it are created in its image.”

“The epithet was quickly moving toward capitalized status: the Lost Generation. In subsequent generations, similar umbrella identities would be ascribed to each era’s under-thirty crowd: the Beat Generation, Generation X, the Millennials, and so on. But the Lost Generation was the forerunner of modern youthful angst banners, and The Sun Also Rises was its bible.”

“What do you hope to acquire when you bid at a prestigious evening auction at Sotheby’s? A bundle of things: a painting of course, but hopefully also a new dimension to how people see you. As Robert Lacey described it in his book about Sotheby’s, you are bidding for class, for a validation of your taste.”

“When the Marchese de Caracciolo wrote to the King of Naples that in England he had discovered a country of ‘22 religions and two sauces,’ these were not words of praise.”

“I’m an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.”

“The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.”

“The photograph, for all its promises of immortality, is always redolent of death.”

“…from her earliest days at Versailles, Marie Antoinette staged a revolt against entrenched court etiquette by turning her clothes and other accoutrements into defiant expressions of autonomy and prestige…it is my belief that she identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival.”

“While on the subject of men, a brief, loud hurrah for homosexuals and their incredible eye for line, proportion, detail, and style. As a Rome magazine writer said: ‘Every woman over thirty needs a homosexual in her life.’ She needs someone who is genuinely interested in making her look better, perhaps because it is his business. Homosexuals, particularly those in the beauty and fashion field, are both expert and generous with their knowledge.”

“Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

“‘Every member of the audience,’ marvelled one visitor, ‘had a listening-tube, hung on the back of the seat in front, with a pair of little knobs that you placed in your ears; at the other end of the listening-tube a phonograph played a text synchronized with the pictures.’”

“In only a decade, homosexuals had graduated from criminals—merely incarcerated after homosexual activity—to mentally ill criminals subject to psychiatric remedies, which included shock therapy, castration, and lobotomies.”

“Elegance can most certainly be acquired. You don’t have to be rich and famous to have an unforgettable presence.”