“The rocking of the deck beneath his feet made his stomach heave, and the wretched food tasted even worse when retched back up.”

“The thought made his belly heave again. Sam bent over the gunwale and retched, but not into the wind. He had gone to the right rail this time. He was getting good at retching.”

“I'm on a frosting sailboat, tossed around by blue-green waves, the deck shifting beneath my feet.”

“His quiet certainty made the ground beneath my feet feel solid. Like someday everything might actually be okay.”

“He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.”

“Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock--his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown--but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max's team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use all the weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them.”