From "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng.  She is describing Mia, an artist who expresses herself through photography.  This is about how artists see.

"As a child she had been fascinated by things that, to her bemusement, no one else seemed to even notice.  “You were such a woolgatherer,” her mother would say, “You sat in your stroller just staring out at the lawn.  You’d sit in the tub and pour water back and forth from one cup to another for an hour if I’d let you.” What Mia remembered of those moments was watching the blades of grass in the breeze, changing color as they went, from dark to light, like the nap of velvet when you brushed your hand over it; the way the stream of water broke itself into droplets as it splashed against the cup’s rim.  Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight.  In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art."