“The weather is superb except for a very keen wind which causes me to lose much time. - I am doing a portrait of your mother in pastel, it seems it is not adequate as a likeness, it is too old, too red, not fine enough, in short, it won't do. This surprises me not at all. You know that everyone accepts the one I made pretty obvious, but that is not much good either.”

“In portraits you need a lot of general, very little of specific. Usually there is too much specificity, always too much... For a portrait to really work well for me, I need for it to be hardly a portrait. Almost for it to no longer be a portrait. It is then that it begins working at full capacity. I like things carried to the extreme limits of what is possible.”

“Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.”

“What… what are you doing?"
"I won't know," he said with a grin. He took a step towards me. "But I'm pretty sure you were doing it too.”

“I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”

“For a short time, I hated them. But when you think about it, what good does that do? It takes so much to hold on to hate—you lose your grip on what's important, you know?”

“I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.”

“They call us Reds. I don't know that that is very bad. I do not believe that is a very bad name. We are pretty red. I tell you I am a real Red.”

“Time won't fly, it's like I'm paralyzed by it.
I'd like to be my old self again, but I'm still trying to find it.
After plaid shirt days and nights when you made me your own,
Now you mail back my things and I walk home alone.But you keep my old scarf from that very first week,
'Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me.
You can't get rid of it 'cause you remember it all too well, yeah.”

“There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too sad.”