“It surprised me to want her [my mother] the most, but I'd never been miserable without her.”

“Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.”

“I hate myself pretty often" .She tilted her face back on the pillow, damning tears and attempting so smile at the same time. "Pretty fucking often”

“I'm not worried about you because you don't get it your own way. You never have, and believe it or not, that makes you extraordinary.”

“See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life "unseeing." I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.”

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.”

“...that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all accurately, and even then you'd often fall short.”