The Highest Tide

I hate myself pretty often" .She tilted her face back on the pillow, damning tears and attempting so smile at the same time. "Pretty fucking often

When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.

Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become then what you are.

See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life "unseeing." I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.

Something had snapped between us, and I had no idea how to glue it back together.

True love is a tiny pearl, easily imagined and easily lost.

...that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all accurately, and even then you'd often fall short.

I was a fluke in a classroom full of flukes on a planet overpopulated by flukes.

I'm not worried about you because you don't get it your own way. You never have, and believe it or not, that makes you extraordinary.

If you don’t feel any connection to the ocean, then ask yourself why your tears, blood and saliva contain about the same percentage of salt.

People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish summer in which i was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.

It surprised me to want her [my mother] the most, but I'd never been miserable without her.

I pointed out how the eel grass lay flat on the beach, and asked them to imagine what it must be like to live in a forest that worked like a folding stage prop, going from three-dimensional to two-dimensional twice a day.

How do you read that sentence, yawn and turn out the lights?

...shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.

Grownups are always more fascinated by what you might become than what you are.

Yet aside from the Angie distraction, it was starting to feel like the summers before it, with long, anonymous, and forgettable, but nearly perfect days away from stuffy classrooms, sloppy joes...

Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I’ve heard since school got out.” I couldn’t even look at him. “Cheer up,” he said. “I brought some real entertainment.” He pulled a brittle copy of The Godfather from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven—he knew the sexy page numbers by heart—in which some imaginary woman described how big this imaginary Sonny was to