“The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.”

“So she doesn't call desertion, poverty, and hard work troubles? She's a brave little girl, and I shall be proud to know her.”

“We would be allowed to work and not cause any trouble for her, but she didn't want us to be any more successful than she was”

“I was so blinded by her talent that I didn't recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.”

“She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.”

“She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.”