Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever. - Anthony Doerr

To really touch something, she is learning — the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop — is to love it.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.