Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

Lady Caroline: As far as I can make out, the young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire.
Mrs. Allonby: The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Everyone knows how to cook parasols—you soak them in milk, then dip them in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them until they're brown as chops. You can do the same thing with a panther amanita that smells of nuts, but people don't pick amanitas. They divide mushrooms into poisonous and edible, and the guidebooks discuss the features that allow you to tell the difference—as if there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms. No mushroom book separates them into beautiful and ugly, fragrant and stinking, nice to touch and nasty, or those that induce sin and those that absolve it. People see what they want to see, and in the end they get what they want—clear, but false divisions. Meanwhile, in the world of mushrooms, nothing is certain.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

Chocolate is a kitchen witch’s secret weapon. It makes friends easily, soothes troubled spirits, and is conducive to romance. When nothing else works, go with chocolate.
—Sadie Trevalyn’s Book of Kitchen Witchery