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"Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing,' he said, 'It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness."
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"I am thankful when I am hungry because then I know that when I eat, the food will taste better. Life has taught me that my true contentment rests in hope, and the pleasure itself is secondary. It is self-awareness, not happiness, that maintains peace."

"Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground."

"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."

"He who is happy in his hut is better than he who is miserable in his palace."

"He is rich that is satisfied."

"Savour a slow-paced contented life."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more."

"If I continually focus on what I don't have, my life will always be completely empty despite the fact that it's completely full."
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"But that is what life is all about, he said. 'It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love."

"Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?"

"There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything."

"The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?"

"But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him."

"Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.'There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.'Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.'And love,' he said, 'is our destiny."

"The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless."

"My life will be what I make it,' he told her. 'That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make."

"She had never believed in fate. She still did not. It would be nonsense of freedom of will and choice, and it was through such freedom that we worked our way through life and learned what we needed to learn. But sometimes, it seemed to her, there was something, some sign, to nudge one along in a certain direction. What one chose to do with that nudge was up to that person."
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