“He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking”

“There was colour everywhere you looked. Colour and beauty and she understood how desperately Lockie would have missed his home. Under the table in that cold stark kitchen he would have held on to what he had known all his life and it would have helped him hold on to himself. That was what you did when you couldn’t see a way out; you held on to the past, hoping it would become the future. You grabbed on to the good stuff and tried to believe that everything would be okay again. It was stupid but it was human nature.”

“She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley's city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body.”

“An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself”

“This was the way it was going to be then, this road she was going to have to walk. She would always be thinking of him so that he would be beside her even when he wasn't there, making her joyous or miserable, but always, always controlling the colour of her days.”

“She twisted her hips in time to his rhythm, riding his hand. He couldn’t stop himself from dipping inside her heat, groaning when she coated his fingers, his palm—just, God, he wanted all that around him again.”