“It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.”

“The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.”

“Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”

“A teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian.”

“The longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard, and sometimes for a few painful minutes she believed it to be no more than friendship”

“When I'm in pain I want everyone I love on the island with me, sitting around the fire, getting drunk on coconut milk, banging out a plan.”