Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.

How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.