“No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.”

“Perhaps one has to have placed life in the center of one’s worldview and valued it as much as I have in order to know that one may not keep it, but must yield it up.”

“He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.”

“To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.”

“The desire of intimacy is the desire to share one's innermost self with another”

“In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.”