“Sometimes I could scarcely breathe with the knowledge that for the rest of my life, whenever we wanted, Peter and I could lie down and do whatever we wished.”

“I fell in love with Peter at that precise instant. I don't suppose many other women know the exact moment the rest of their lives began.”

“At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long.”

“Peter and I danced in bare feet in the cold wet undergrowth while the moon poured its wild old silver down on us and the water ran black and ancient and the moss shone.”

“I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.”

“There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of starts fardly showed through the scrim of high clouds. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea's breath. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crepe myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says 'ocean' to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.”

“I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.”