“One of the greatest gifts for me is to know that I have purpose beyond myself....”

“Tell me what this means," Dax said. "I'm a busy woman with a ship to run and a crisis to handle and I've surrounded myself with smart, dedicated people for the sole purpose of interpreting unintelligible squiggles for me.”

“An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.”

“Fact One: Races are won or lost in key moments. Fact Two: Success in the sport is, above all else, about enduring suffering.”

“Readers tend to tolerate such "accidents"... when they get the characters into trouble but they're less accepting when the author uses them to rescue people. The "deus ex machina"...in one stroke it renders meaningless all the efforts of the cast.”

“Character is destiny. For the cronic do-gooder, the happy-go-lucky sociopath, the dysfunctional family, under the gun everyone diverts to who they are. We may hunger to map out a new course, but for most of us, the lines have been drawn since we were 5.”

“What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimeters of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.”