She was right. There is always an answer to despair, and that is the promise of beauty waiting in the future. I know it is coming because I have seen and felt beauty in the past. Stacks of apricots in Rome; raccoon footprints in snow; piles of oyster shells bleached white over winter; lime green leaves of spring; burnt orange leaves of fall; Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher; the old stone walls of Connecticut winding around my yard; Venice at dusk, rose-colored from sky and sea: memories of beauty, sometimes experienced alone and sometimes shared.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 43