“All emotion receded, pulled out like low tide, leaving my brain an empty ocean bottom”

“The tide goes out imperceptibly. The boulders show and seem to rise up and the ocean recedes leaving little pools, leaving wet weed and moss and sponge, iridescence and brown and blue and China red. On the bottoms lie the incredible refuse of the sea, shells broken and chipped and bits of skeleton, claws, the whole sea bottom a fantastic cemetery on which the living scamper and scramble.”

“Hearts are like stones on an ocean beach...And people are like the tides that leave permanent marks on them.”

“I start to feel like an empty canvas under the hands of Michelangelo. No! Like a swimmer who's gone out to far in the ocean being pulled back to shore by a fashion lifeguard.”

“and it seemed to me that we was like seafarers, and the tober was the ocean. We was passing the landlubbers by. We gawped at each other, us from our ships, and them from their shores, but the gap between us was so big we couldn’t cross it. It was high tide or low tide, or whatever tide would prevent us from dropping anchor and rowing out to them, to exchange gifts and brides, gods and diseases”

“The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.”