“It had been hard t live int he wilderness without a goal, without a future. Now, at last, we had one.p 166”

“...joy is a thing to be shared, quickly, without hesitation.”

“She has known some happiness there, a privileged moment of revelation, a glimpse into an unexplored part of herself, into something beyond herself. But she is also suspicious of such moment; they do not last, and one never knows where and when they might recur, like islands of an uncharted archipelago. p 108”

“...he is caught by the urgency of departure, as if this island were not good enough.p 133”

“To have wings and yet to want to ride...”

“That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people. - The Elegance of the Hedgehog”

“All young people believed they were immortal, and he had personal experience of the methods they used to cull themselves - base-jumping, sky-diving, hard drugs, alcohol. Over the years he'd come to see solid sense in the ways so-called savage peoples formalised their rituals of manhood; without such regulation, young men seemed compelled to invent their own, even more lethal, rites of passage.”