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.

Every end is the beginning of something else.

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.

When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.

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

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.