Elizabeth Haydon, The Floating Island

"When you're of a different race people distrust you because they are afraid. If you don't give them reason to dislike you, it becomes their problem, not yours."

"We each have our belssings and our curses. In the end it makes us equals."

"I had always thought of home not as a house, or even a place, but a feeling of safety and acceptance, a warm light when the rest of the world was a dark, forbidding place. Whenever my family was around, wherever we were, I felt like I was home."

"So now you know that, as dark as the depths of the sea may be, as dark as the night gets without a moon, it is not really true darkness. It's just waiting for light to return. There are places that are truly dark in this world, Ven, but this place here, this open stretch of sea where you are floating, is not one of them. It's not really dark here - it's just night. If you hang on and stay awake, in a short while the edges of the sky will start to turn gray, then pink, and the sun will rise, and there will be blue above and all around you again."

"Tell people the hammered truth, and it will ring like steel against an anvil."