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

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.

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

Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it.

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

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.

Scars are just another kind of memory.