“Her family was a relay team racing toward Tomorrowland, but her father died, and in their shock they kept losing the baton.”

“She felt like a baton getting passed along in a relay race, completely devoid of any control over her destiny.”

“In our work, the question is, how much you absorb from others. So for me, creativity, is really like a relay race. As children we are handed a baton. Rather than passing it onto the next generation as is, first we need to digest it and make it our own.”

“Her life was monotonous, but it kept her out of trouble. . . . This, her father would say, was called being an adult.”

“She'd been real melancholy in the fall — religious melancholy — it ran in her family. Her father worried so much over believing that he had committed the unpardonable sin that he died in the asylum.”

“I kept hoping because she couldn’t afford to lose hope. I kept my faith so she wouldn’t lose hers.”