The present no matter what I brought couldn’t change the past. The Past was set and sealed.

Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight--at least as they normally experienced them....Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam, pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

Everything I ever said to you was true and is true.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.