“If she were here I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off her. I would hold her so close she'd beg me to let her breathe. I'd kiss her so hard she'd plead for mercy. I'd unfasten her clothing and lie with her on that hard bed, and what was between us would be as far above the ordinary congress between man and woman as the stars are above their pale reflections in the lake below.”

“Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.”

“We cannot know the future. All we can do is face it bravely. We should take heed of those we love and respect. But in the end, we make every decision alone.”

“You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bold; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life.”

“What I do . . . the path I tread . . . it brings some choices that test me hard.”

“Trust is a thing you know without words.”

“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows.”

“You've only just discovered you have a heart. Let it beat a little.”

“The error was not yours, Somerled," Eyvind said quietly, moving to the doorway. "It was mine. I failed to teach you the one lesson you could not do without: how to be a man.”

“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows. - Somerled.”

“Look forward, not back," the Hag said. "All is change. Do not regret. Instead, learn.”