“She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.”

“If I could die saving two lives, I would, provided each of those two people were the kind of people who would die to save two more like them.”

“I want to die or be trapped on a deserted island with David Wolfenbaker. One or the other, but I've got to get out of homeroom.”

“It would ’a’ been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.”

“I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing.”

“We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.”