“I rekindled a ­friendship I hadn't had in a long time and I was reminded of all the parts of me that had left. I was like, 'Wow, I love to paint and to write, and to be outside...'”

“Nothing had been okay, not for a long time. And every moment that I thought I was getting close, like the one I’d had earlier, seemed to remind the universe that I didn’t deserve that, not yet.”

“She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

“But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”

“While I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgment in all our parts.”

“"I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me."
After a pause full of intense thought on my part, I asked: "But if one hasn't always emotion. What then?"
"Do not paint," he quickly answered. "When I came in here to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted.”

“I've had a good life…. I have managed to do all I could wish for --even be a government servant. Now I feel whatever time I have left should be spent doing what I like best -- writing plays.”

“Art was what I originally started out to do and music came second at first. I had a year at art college but I left because it was too much like school. I give all my paintings away to people I like.”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

“I thought: should I be worried? I was under arrest. In a town where I'd never been before. Apparently for murder. But I knew two things. First, they couldn't prove something had happened if it hadn't happened. And second, I hadn't killed anybody. Not in their town, and not for a long time, anyway.”