"But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope."

"If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears."

"One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?,' she said, 'I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up."

"Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on."

"I do not admire greatness that has no substance."

"I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness."

"One day you will learn that love does not always betray you."

"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."

"Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I am still not used to being the possessor of such a grand title. I believe I shall have to start wearing a purple satin turban and carrying a lorgnette."

"I believe, he said gently, 'we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else's. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together."

"I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect."

"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."

"My mind cannot grasp forever,' she told him. 'There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end?"

"Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex."

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

"You really love me?' she asked wistfully.'The devil!' he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. 'Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?"

"Why do I want to run from happiness?"

"Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all."

"If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck."

"As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too."

"Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude."

"I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win."

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

"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."

"Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.Tomorrow he would begin to set her free."

"After a few awkward moments, Lizzy joined them and they skipped along the avenue, the three of them, laughing and whooping and altogether making an undignified spectacle of themselves."

"My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones."

"I would be consumed by you,' she said, and blinked her eyes furiously when she felt them fill with tears. 'You would sap all the energy and all the joy from me. You would put out all the fire of my vitality.'Give me a chance to fan the flames of that fire,' he said, 'and to nurture your joy."

"Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?"

"He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it."

"People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it."

"Families are wonderful institution,' he said. 'I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that."

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

"Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?"

"We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same."

"Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for."

"Love does not last forever, then?'He asked me the same thing this morning,' she said. 'No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived."

"He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done."

"Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?"

"Sometimes even the imagination lets one down."

"It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself."

"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."