“As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction.”

“I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.”

“If you fictionalized my character, I could live a bit longer.”

“If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.”

“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

“26 Thought-Provoking Questions:1. if you could own any single object that you don't have now, what would it be?2. if you could have one superpower, what would it be?3. if you could meet anyone in history, who would you choose and what would you ask them?4. if you could add one person to your family, who would it be?5. if you could be best friends with anyone in the world, who would you pick?6. if you could change anything about your face, what would it be7. if you could change anything about your parents, what would it be?8. if you could fast-forward your life, how old would you want to be and why?9. what is the one object you own that matters more to you than anything else?10. what is the one thing in the world that you are most afraid of?11. if you could go to school in a foreign country, which one would you pick?12. if you had the power to drop any course from your curriculum, what would it be?13. if you caught your best friend stealing from you, what would you do?14. if you had a chance to spend a million dollars on anything but yourself, how would you spend it?15. if you could look like anyone you wanted, who would that be?16. if you were a member of the opposite sex, who would you want to look like?17. if you could change your first name, what name would you chose?18. what's the best thing about being a teen?19. what's the worst?20. if someone you like asked you out on a date, but your best friend had a crush on this person, what would you do?21. what is the worst day of the week?22. if you had to change places with one of your friends, who would you chose?23. if you could be any sports hero, who would you like to be?24. what's the one thing you've done in your life that you wish you could do over differently?25. what would you do if you found a dollar in the street? what if you found $100? $10,000?26. if you had a chance to star in any movie, who would you want as a costar?”