“My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.”

“He tilted his head to the side, still watching me in that same, disconcerting way. “Some things are true, drunk or sober. You should know that. You deal in facts all the time.”“Yeah, but this isn’t—” I couldn’t argue with him looking at me like that. “I have to go. Wait… you didn’t take the cross.” I held it out to him. He shook his head. “Keep it. I think I’ve got something else to help center my life.”

“I shall bring him his tea and work myself to death by the time I am thirty bearing children and scrubbing floors and working in the fields digging turnips till my hands bleed and my back gives out and everyone urges me to keep on for just one more year, at which point I will die of exhaustion and the meagerness of my own life. I will love him and care for him, will never tell him to get his own tea, or sweep the ashes from the hearth or give birth to his own twelfth child himself.”

“I know a lot about when I was a little girl, because my sister used to keep a diary. Today I keep her diary in a drawer next to by bed. I like to see how her memories were the same as mine, but also different.”

“Toward the end of their relationship she'd told him once, "I wish I could give you what you're looking for, but I don't know what it is. There's a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone, including me. Its as if I'm not the one you're really with. Your mind is on someone else." He tried to deny it, but she didn't believe him. "I'm a woman - I know these things. When you look at me sometimes, I know you're seeing someone else. Its like you keep waiting for her to pop out of thin air to take you away from all this...”

“I folded my arm. "You know, I suspect you and Edward would be friends if it weren't for this place."His eyes were on fire. "It's not this island keeping us from being friends."My pounding heart stole the words to reply to that.”