“Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.”

“Well, you would realize…Like i eventually realized…That the good things about her?All the beautiful?It’s not real.It’s fake.So you keep your ocean,I’ll take the lake.”

“Beauty, happiness, they're things so big they can't capture them with their scientific words. It's like what they used to call magic.”

“Find happiness where you can," she said softly. "It's not just the great big whammo things. Look for the beauty of life in the small things, and you'll be the happiest person alive.”

“...this beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath...”

“The loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the dark evergreens. No planes disturbed the sky. I felt dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.”