"The occasional face would sparkle. Stand out like a diamond in kimberlite. Hers did. Hers could make you feel like it was all worthwhile. Life, that is. Working yourself blind just to earn the reward of existence. A face can do that, you know – the right face. It can lift your heart in an instant. Like watching a love story in an old movie, where everything is so perfect you get that warm sensation in your stomach that flows mellifluously through your body and turns up the corners of your mouth. For that moment, things just feel that little bit better."

"The whole world was criss-crossed with civilisation. Everyone connected to everyone else by roads, rails, pipes and cables. It was like some astral giant had scooped up the world in a net and pulled it tight, scarring the landscape with this new kind of life. Stringy veins of high-speed life, devouring the planet like a cancer. For a while you can escape it. Jump off the veins and run to a land that concrete forgot."

"They say time is a great healer. They are wrong. If you were sealed in a box for eternity then your last pain would live with you forever. It would take every step along side yours, all the way to oblivion. Because it’s not time that heals, it’s experiences. Every moment of our lives we are wading through a sea of stimuli, absorbing them into our soul through our senses. Slowly they erode away the sharp edges of our pasts. Smoothing our jagged pains to dull pebbles that are merely uncomfortable when we stand on them in the wrong way. But sometimes the pain is too acute, has cut too deep, that we need something more to heal the wounds than the everyday sensations offered by the stagnant life we float around in. We need something new, something big. A tidal wave of emotion that so completely drenches us that we come out the other side a different person. Where the pains of our past are still present but they no longer define us – this new thing does. Because of this we must never be afraid of the wave when it comes, with whatever it brings, good or bad. It’s what takes us forward.

No pain is etched in marble, merely scribed in sand, awaiting the next wave, as vulnerable as a flame to the water’s mighty hand."