“The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days.”

“A painting that is well composed is half finished.”

“An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.”

“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”

“But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.”

“They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world.”