You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

Once, this whole world had been hidden beneath a shallow sea.

I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.