“This Skarmouth is raw and hungry, striving and unknowable. Everything the races make me feel on the inside is bleeding up through the seams of the street tonight.”

“His wife's a brand of Christian that forbids a gathering that involves young women dancing in the streets but not races where men die”

“Tell me what to wish for." Tell me what to ask the sea for.""To be happy. Happiness.""I don't think such a thing is had on Thisby. And if it is, I don't know how you would keep it.""You whisper to it. What it needs to hear. Isn't that what you said?""That's what I said. What do I need to hear?""That tomorrow we'll rule the Scorpio Races as king and queen of Skarmouth and I'll save the house and you'll have your stallion. Dove will eat golden oats for the rest of her days and you will terrorize the races each year and people will come from every island in the world to find out how it is you get horses to listen to you. The piebald will carry Mutt Malvern into the sea and Gabriel will decide to stay on the island. I will have a farm and you will bring me bread for dinner.""That's what I needed to hear.”

“I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you're not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.”

“Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord.”

“Now I am the unknown, the unknowable.”

“Sean looks at me then, his eyes bright, in a way that makes me feel out of sorts. I glare back.”