“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

“(letters) They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown....still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.”

“She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.”

“Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”

“I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.”

“She was my life raft, my turtle.”