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.

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

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.

Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.

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.

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.

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