“She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.”

“I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.”

“She told me once that the year she went to England she painted her buttons yellow so she would remember what the sun felt like.”

“I shall have twenty cats and talk to them all," she said, picking up the volume of poetry. "My cats and I shall have fish every day for dinner." Her imagination taking flight, she finished, dropping the book into the box, "And I shall memorize every line in this book and paint it in calligraphy on my living room walls.”

“You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.”

“No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.”