“Just because it's common doesn't make it less powerful.”

“Cursed, I was cursed, and my mother said shed given up magic for good, said it was a terrible thing, but she wasnt above using it to keep me at her side, and shes a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud and p...”

“I stretched out on the carpet, eyes glazed over, my heart whirring with frustration and fear, and as my mothers curse slowly, firmly, pushed my eyelids closed, my body went still. But on the inside...”

“I am going to be murdered.It wasnt any easier to face in the daytime.”

“This will be the night I escape. The thought repeated in my mind like a refrain, over and over, and I believed it so hard that I whispered it aloud: This will be the night I escape!”

“I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and thats when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the wat...”

“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...”

“What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.”