Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

...What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.

I learned failure early and mastered it.