“I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and tur...”

“You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents...”

“Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and cur...”

“The way two people can and everything place, find each other in a crowd, and change your life the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate. In fate love some extra au...”

“A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you...”

“People can attach themselves to something--an idea, another person, a desire--with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thin...”

“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...”