Jim Lynch

“I'm not worried about you because you don't get it your own way. You never have, and believe it or not, that makes you extraordinary.”

“Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become then what you are.”

“True love is a tiny pearl, easily imagined and easily lost.”

“The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.”

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.”

“See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life "unseeing." I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.”

“...that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all accurately, and even then you'd often fall short.”

“It surprised me to want her [my mother] the most, but I'd never been miserable without her.”

“Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.”

“I hate myself pretty often" .She tilted her face back on the pillow, damning tears and attempting so smile at the same time. "Pretty fucking often”

“I was a fluke in a classroom full of flukes on a planet overpopulated by flukes.”

“Something had snapped between us, and I had no idea how to glue it back together.”