“Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.”

“In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.”

“Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.”

“In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same.”

“The whole thing feels like a pool of water that I'm trying to hold in my hands.”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”

“An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges, the overflow finally giving way - he could not longer suffer his own cowardice. ”