At school I had never been much good at writing. I could never think of what to write or how to begin. But on the Peggy Sue I found I could open up my log and just write. There was always so much I wanted to say. And that's the thing. I found I didn't really write it down at all. Rather, I said it. I spoke it from my head, down my arm, through my fingers and my pencil, and onto the page. And that's how it reads to me now, all these years later, like me talking. (p. 23)

I still dream of the elephants in South Africa. I loved how slow they are, how thoughtful. I loved their wise, weepy eyes. (p. 34-35)

Even then as I stood there, that first morning, filled with apprehension at the terrifying implications of my dreadful situation, I remember thinking how wonderful it was, a green jewel of an island framed in white, the sea all around it a silken shimmering blue. Strangely, perhaps comforted somehow by the extraordinary beauty of the place, I was not at all downhearted. On the contrary I felt strangely elated. I was alive. (p. 50)

In the dying light of each day he would sit beside me and watch over me, the last of the evening sun on his face. I felt as if he were healing me with his eyes. (p. 102 in the chapter "All That Silence Said")

I had always liked to draw, but from Kensuke I learned to love it, that to draw or paint I first had to observe well, then set out the form of the picture in my head and send it down my arm through the tip of the brush and onto the shell. He taught me all this entirely without speaking. He simply showed me. (p. 108-9)