You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.

Scars are just another kind of memory.

Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it's done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.

Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.

Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion.

The law's the law, but people are people.

Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.