“I'm so tired.Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking. I'd like to hear the trees snapy away and see the water come higher, I thought, but only from a place where it couldn't reach me.Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see the wall of water coming down, and to know this is it, I am finished, and before you could even complete the thought, you would be swallowed, and whole.”

“I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”

“We walked to the edge of the creaky deck. He stood with his chest pressed against my back, arms tight around me. It was cold enough to make my nose hurt, and my feet were frozen, but I wanted to stand right where I was for a long time, breathing in the smell of the ocean. "There's the lighthouse." He pointed. I could just see a tall shadow. Then the light on top blinked. "In the daytime, you can see down to the water.""It's amazing.""We'll come back.Whenever you want."I liked the sound of that.”

“When the pages are in the typewriter, I can't see his face.In that way i am choosing you over him.I don't need to see him.I don't need to know if he is looking up at me.It's not even that I trust him not to leave.I know this won't last.I'd rather be me than him.The words are coming so easily.The pages are coming easily.At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.He said, Let there be light.And there was darkness.”

“I could take care of that obstacle for her - I'd tear down anything standing between us - but I couldn't destroy what I couldn't even see.”

“We could've done this anywhere, but I wanted you to see me, to see this," he said, gesturing at the room. "I wanted you to know where I come from, what I am under the choices I make.”