How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I wanted to spend the summer alone. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I just wanted to sleep, ride my bike to the lake, and sail away. I wanted to stay gone all day and then come home late, take a long shower, and go back to bed. (5.1)
Poor Ben ends up with the opposite of his wish. Instead of spending the summer alone, he spends it on a tiny boat with his entire family.
Quote #2
For my birthday last year, Mom had asked me if I wanted a party. I told her no. I told her I wanted to take the boat out, just Andrew and me, and camp out at one of the coves on the lake. […] In the end, I didn't invite Andrew. I decided I wanted to go by myself. (13.19)
Whoa. Ben's birthday celebration of solitude sounds pretty intense.
Quote #3
Boats would sail by, but they wouldn't see me. […] I would float and float and float. No one would ever find me. I shivered and grabbed the last foot of the line as it slid by. (14.37-14.38)
The book makes it sound like it's pretty easy to get lost at sea. Be careful out there, people.
Quote #4
Dad said I should write too, maybe even to Andrew, but when I sat down with the paper, I couldn't think of anything to say. Everything would have been like speaking a foreign language. (17.11)
Been feels estranged from his "real" life back home—so much so that just writing his best friend feels impossible. What would he say?
Quote #5
Among these last scraps of land were islands where only a few people lived, as well as those occasional cays with no people at all and no names, either. There was no natural freshwater and no way to grow food. (18.1)
The Byron brothers will soon have the pleasure of spending three months on one of these uninhabitable islands. If they'd stayed another month, they probably would have opened a bed and breakfast.
Quote #6
"I am not crazy." I felt prickles like fear in the hair on the back of my neck. "I am a very lonely man—who wants his wife back." (19.76-19.77)
Jim Byron feels so lonely after his wife's death that he doesn't attend to the people—his sons—who are still alive. He doesn't really even stop to think that his sons may feel lonely, either.
Quote #7
All around us in a brilliant circle for hundreds and thousands of empty miles, we could see only the moving, glittering ocean and that one island with no beach to land on. (30.12)
Somehow the Byron brothers have found the one corner of the earth that doesn't have a McDonald's or a Starbucks.
Quote #8
We were on it. The three of us together. Lost in the middle of the great wide sea. (31.45)
Things could be worse—the Byron brothers could be lost at sea, instead of on a deserted island. Still, how will the rescuers find them?