"One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest."

"And I need you, my love,' he said. 'I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that-Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you.'To look after Augusta?' she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. 'To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?'Yes,' he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet.'And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover."

"Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain."

"Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability."

"Have you noticed,' she asked him, 'how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?"

"And he knew at that moment that love world never die, that it would never fade away altogether. The time might come when he would meet and marry someone else. He might even be reasonably happy. But there would always be a deep precious place in his heart that belonged to his first real love."

"But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong."

"Ah, but dreams cannot be captured with promises,' he said. 'Like water, they elude our grasp. But water is the staff of life. I believe your dream will come true if only because you will not compromise on it and let it go too lightly."

"Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?"

"But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?"

"I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy."

"It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part."

"Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.Life itself had become a secret affair."

"Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness."

"Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it."

"He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant."

"It is foolish to regret anything form one's past."

"Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?"

"Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives."

"Tears never were worth the effort of crying them."

"She was not sorry. And if it was the wine telling her that, then she would tell the wine the same thing tomorrow. She was not sorry."

"Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?"

"Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it."

"But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams."

"All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?"

"Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong."

"Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word."

"The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love."

"The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?"

"The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away."

"Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery."

"Life is a precious possession...It is what one makes of it. - Charity Duncan."

"Why is it,' she asked, snuggling closer, 'that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?"

"There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness."

"It is stronge how smells can bring back vivid memories."

"And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?' he said softly.'Assuredly,' she said, 'provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything."

"She had made reason and common sense her gods. She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she unstood to be her mentors."

"Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken."

"His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea."

"But marriage is forever.'Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, 'though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you."

"The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself."

"But there were certain moments in life that forever defined one as a person - in one's own estimation, anyway. And one's own self esteem, when all was said and done, was of far more importance than the fickle esteem of one's peers."

"Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing."

"He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven-at least in this life-was neither a time nor a placeto be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again toleave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.Very much on the verge of tears.And very frightened."

"There is something infinitely better than happily-ever-after. There is happiness. Happiness is a living, dynamic thing, Eve, and has to be worked on every moment for the rest of our lives. It is a far more exciting prospect than that silly static idea of a happily-ever-after. Would you not agree?' - Aidan Bedwyn."

"You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you."

"She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it."

"There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it.What the devil was the reason?"

"And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive."

"And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. He disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy.He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it.He was not amused.Or in any way pleased."