“It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)”

“You are not the first man to miss a woman's more subtle communication . . . They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.”

“Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.”

“Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.”

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

“The small smiles everybody wanted to try to figure out – they meant nothing, really. She wasn't so good at talking and the smiles made up for it. They filled the spaces in which she ought to have answers for things with something that gave people more questions.”