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.

To have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past.

Every end is the beginning of something else.

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

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: fierceness on a scale only gods can summon.

Scars are just another kind of memory.

Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late.