"Even though Sean still held my head down I was the only one who thought to ask'Who's driving the boat?' Over the motor I heard girls screaming at us the instant before we crashed."

"At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work."

"It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then we let of of the ledge and swing on it with our full weight."