“A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.”

“If only it were so easy to pick up the broken pieces of life, glue them back together, and cover them with paint like nothing had ever happened.”

“Baby, I ain't trash. Trash is something you throw away. My people keep me.”

“Take a piece of glass of the size of a half sheet of royal folio paper, and fix it… between your eye and the object you wish to portray. Then move it away until your eye is two-thirds of a braccio away from the piece of glass, and fasten your head by means of an instrument in such a way as to prevent any movement of it whatsoever. Then close or cover up one eye, and with a brush or a piece of red chalk finely ground mark out on the glass what is visible beyond it; afterwards, copy it by tracing on paper from the glass, then prick it out upon paper of a better quality and paint it if you so desire, paying special attention to the aerial perspective.”

“Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then —
How old is Spring, Miranda?”

“Fortune is like glass—the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.”
Fortuna vitrea est: tum cum splendet frangitur.

“Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?”

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

“It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

“On summer evenings, before bathtime, my dad used to pick me up by the ankles and swing me round and round! Then one arm and one leg! Like an aeroplane - Wheeeee! We trashed that bathroom.”