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was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.
There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.
magic is just the truth that people believe.
For most people, that truth is whatever helps them sleep at night, whatever makes their lives easier. It’s different from objective truth.”
Isn’t it worth lying a little bit, if it helps get to the truth?”
Maybe Preston was right about why people believed in magic. The truth was an ugly, dangerous thing.
If he was not real, there would never be any escape from him.
The mariner’s hubris isn’t necessarily in his belief that he won’t die, but his belief that the worst the sea can do is kill him.”
It was a beautiful house, but not a clever one. It was a house with no imagination.
romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality?
He liked to sell authors just as much as he liked to sell books.
The author is part of the story,
that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”
“Of drowning? Of the dark? Yes. Those are very reasonable things to be scared of,” Preston said tersely.
You told me I don’t see myself clearly, but I do. I know what I am. I know that, deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving.
the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.
He kissed her, or she kissed him—it mattered only as much as it mattered whether the house was sinking or the sea was rising.
surprise, half surrender. The yielding was easy when the assault was so tender.
“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”
them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last.
Fear of the sea is fear of the eternal—because how can you win against something so enduring.
Effy understood why the Southerners, in the very ancient days before the Drowning, believed that there were only two gods: the Sky and the Ocean. The land itself was just something caught and pressed between their warring furies.
“when things are meant to rot, they will.”
Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.
The architecture of her new life was taking shape, and there were windows and doors.
