“A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.”

“There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.”

“At fifteen, it's still kind of tough to see that people can't be compressed into one color all the time. They shift and change, letter days or not, many layers of many colors.”

“Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.”

“Night—it’s the only thing that will cover up one of my black moods. Good thing my depression isn’t an every day kind of thing. It’s an after day thing.”

“One of the things that makes a dead leaf fall to the ground is the bud of the new leaf that pushes it off the limb.”