“I start to feel like an empty canvas under the hands of Michelangelo. No! Like a swimmer who's gone out to far in the ocean being pulled back to shore by a fashion lifeguard.”

“All emotion receded, pulled out like low tide, leaving my brain an empty ocean bottom”

“Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.”

“I felt like I was staring out across an ocean that I was going to have to swim from shore to shore before I could rest again.”

“I lifted my hand and pulled the blue paper cap back a little, until a piece of my red fell out, then I reached my hand back inside the case. I slid my finger under some tubes and into her tiny purple hand. And just like that, like she had known it was me all along, she squeezed it.”

“I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling.”