“You have some lovely books," she said. "I like the one with the pictures of polar bears.""The books with words too tricky?"She released a strangled laugh."Would you care to explain the system?" Turner stared at the shelves.Matty moved in front of him and pointed. "They're sorted by color.""Ah." Dear God."And by size.""Mmm." Turner felt his mouth start to twitch. "It didn't occur to you to shelve them alphabetically by author name or even title?""Well, yes, but no.""The thing is, you have so many. I organized one boxful only to find the next box wrecked what I'd done so I thought they'd look nicer if all the same color spines sat together. I tried to follow the colors of the spectrum. Look, the books go up and down in waves."He'd noticed. It made him feel seasick.”

“Life is like a box of crayons. Most people are the 8 color boxes, but what you're really looking for are the 64 color boxes with the sharpeners on the back. I fancy myself to be a 64 color box, though I've got a few missing. It's okay though, because I've got some more vibrant colors like periwinkle at my disposal. I have a bit of a problem though in that I can only meet the 8 color boxes. Does anyone else have that problem? I mean there are so many different colors of life, of feeling, of articulation. So when I meet someone who's an 8 color type...I'm like, hey girl, Magenta! and she's like, oh, you mean purple! and she goes off on her purple thing, and I'm like, no I want Magenta!”

“All books are coloring books, if you are in possession of a childlike imagination, and a box of markers.”

“But I'd done what I could to warm the place up. I'd started with a welcome mat. It had a happy face on it and was bright and colorful. It didn't say "Welcome." It said "!!!WELCOME!!!"I knew he wouldn't like it. I considered it more of an amusing test to see how open he was to change. He'd let me move in with him, but how flexible was he really willing to be?It disappeared the day after I placed it by the front door. It was just--poof!--gone. When I imagined the shocked look on his face when he would have first seen it, a spot of wacky and whimsical color in his otherwise monochromatic world, I started to laugh hysterically.”

“Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.”

“I asked Granny one time if she thought green might be God's favorite color since he'd made so many shades of it.”