Please do not strain yourself, Miss Doyle. I won't have my girls going cross-eyed in the name of art.

Next time we see you, you’ll be on trial for some ingenious crime!” Dottie said with a laugh. Evie grinned. “Just as long as they know my name.

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.

Just because you're funny doesn't mean you get to be cruel.

I refuse to let the past find me here.

He told me that once, in the war, he’d come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn’t speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier’s head. He didn’t do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another.

...dreams were dreams and reality was reality and she felt people were better off understanding the difference.