“[True beauty] seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite. It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly...you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.”

“Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.' I chance a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: 'It connect you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise on a clear blue day of the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly'--my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air--'you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.”

“If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go.”

“This is beautiful," I said, ignoring the shop window to trace the gleaming stone walls fronting another boutique."You know what's funny?" Jacob asked. He didn't wait for my answer. "You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself."***I swallowed hard. Erik thought my body was beautiful, Karin that it was enviable. At random times, people had noted that my hands were beautiful, or my hair. The Twisted Sisters had called my art beautiful. Mom had the best intentions and always told me before and after my laser surgeries that I would be beautiful. But no one had ever said that I was beautiful, all my parts taken together, not just the bits and pieces.”

“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?”

“That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.”

“Physical beauty wasn't the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.”