“True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your min...”

“I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.”

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts ha...”

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous s...”

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hea...”

“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above t...”

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully a...”