“I am always looking outside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what's out there. And what's out there is constantly changing.”

“A true Zen saying: "Nothing is what I want.”

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

“What's the point of quoting the Bible to people who don't believe it's true" Dad would say.”

“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”

“My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.”

“I'm so disgusting,' I try to argue, but his hands and his voice and his marble mother's eyes won't let it be true anymore.'No,' he says. 'You're beautiful.”