The war was like an ocean, an ocean where everyone burned or drowned, and only a few could swim it.

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.

Happiness was not always a fleeting thing, but a state of mind, of being, having lived, loved, even after being poor, alone, having survived. Even with the pain in her hands she had happiness.

All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.

There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard.

All their stories clung like barnacles to the great whale, the whale they loved enough to watch pass by. They were people of the whale. They worshiped the whales. Whalebones had once been the homes of their ancestors who covered the giant ribs with skins and slept inside the shelters. The whales were their lives, their comfort. The swordfish, their friends, sometimes wounded a whale and it would come to shore to die, or arrive already dead. It was an offering to the hungry people by their mother sea and friend, the swordfish.

Thomas didn't call. He was a lie. His cells were all lies and his being was made up of lies. Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. Thomas was walking, thinking, My body is made of lies. There are lies on my tongue. He no longer knew the truth.

There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.

When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.

I am earth, he thinks now. That's why I lived. I became the earth. This became his way of surviving.