“The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.”

“There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love.The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.”

“What are you doing here?”All right, he was standing in front of an easel, holding a paint palette and brush. “Taxidermy?” he responded with just a touch of his own sarcasm.”

“To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.”

“The cloth was wrinkled and twisted from the struggle. His forehead was damp, and he lay his forearm across it and stared across the room at the clock. Its pendulum rotated and gathered momentum only to slow and reverse its course. He watched it for a time and slid out of the bed to dress.”

“Yeah," he replied, his voice scratchy and raw as he stared at Will. "I am sick. Sick of lying, sick of being afraid, sick of pretending the person I love most in the world isn't standing right in front of me." He slipped his fingers into Will's and before the other man could register what was happening, Scott pulled him up hard against his body and kissed him, deep and tender. When he pulled back, he stared into Will's astonished eyes.”