“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you see what you’re looking at more clearly. Did you know that?”

“Look at the earth and you think it's solid," he said. "But look deeper and you'll see it's riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.”

“I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.”

“Well, well,” she murmurs as I back away.She makes a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs and looks at my skin through it.“You’re right,” she says. “The boy’s a living work of art.”

“All of us can do what we like.”“No we can’t. You’re stupid if you think so.”

“Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?…Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.”

“Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.”