1. "She had become his North Star, as he had once been hers, and when she disappeared from the deck of the sailboat with the sun at her back and the mountains looming over her shoulders, a knot in his stomach pulled tightly until he thought his heart would burst."
2. "The current rushed past him, dragging him backward. Fear rose in his throat like bile. He couldn't get out. He was going to die here, stuck in this frigid river."
3. "When you face something this dangerous and this real, your instincts kick in. You stop feeling sorry for yourself and just react. You don't think about what you're going to do; you just do it. You become animal. You have to."
4. "As the sun dipped lower, shadows from the cliffs reached farther out onto the water. The air chilled quickly. The river was wide, and the waves seemed taller than he'd ever seen."
5. "Sometimes you have to risk losing everything to find what's truly important. You have to step off the edge, even if it's just a leap of faith, and hope that you'll find a safe landing on the other side."
6. "If you give up, then everything you've done up until that point is lost. You can't go back and change the past. You can only keep going, even when it hurts, even when it seems impossible."
7. "The river is a wild, untamed force of nature. It doesn't care about your plans or your dreams. It just flows, following its own course, carrying everything with it."
8. "When you get right down to it, I suppose survival comes down to one thing: hope. As long as you have that flickering flame inside of you, even when it's barely burning, you can persevere."
9. "Life is full of risks. If you never take any chances, you'll never grow as a person. You have to step outside your comfort zone and see what you're capable of."
10. "The river was his journey. It was his teacher. It was his friend."