“Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.”

“I will not go on, I thought. I won't. I will throw my soul to the wind and blow into a thousand pieces. I will wash up on a shore somewhere like bleached and broken driftwood. I will dry out in the sun until I-and any gift I ever had-shrivel into the sand.”

“We are shoulder to shoulder due to the size of the cab, and if Gratton is made of flour and potatoes, Sean is made of stone and driftwood and possibly those prickly anemones that sometimes wash up on shore.”

“What do you think about when you can't sleep? Sometimes I think about the ocean. I can see it lapping on the shore, waves rolling in one after the other, washing over the sand, never stopping. That's what usually puts me to sleep.”

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”

“... I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life.”