“7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.”

“Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.”

“You just don’t get it. The point I’m trying to make—the point you’re deliberately ignoring—is that tomorrow it might all go away. You have to do what you want and take what you want now.”

“Might paint something I might want to hang here someday, might write something I might want to say to you someday, might do something I'd be proud of someday. Mark my words, I might be something someday.”

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

“Oh yeah. It would be terrible for you to have only one working fang. Your friends might want to call you Lefty”