They float upon the surface of the darkness in which I'm drowning.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can't know what I mean by what I say.You can't know a woman's vulnerability. You can't know the sense of power that belongs to me now.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

So I was a stone in the sea.
Gravity gave up on keeping me above the surface. I did not try to swim and so I sank to the bottom with no will to turn back. ”I’m tired,” I told him. ”I’m done”.
But he wouldn’t let me and he held me up even on his hardest days and he was a lighthouse when all I saw was darkness.

For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.