Rosamunde Pilcher

“Life is so extraordinary. Wonderful surprises are just around the most unexpected corners.”

“- Elfrida, are you about to cry?- I might be.- Why?- Relief. ♥”

“A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew it all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question, which from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance.”

“There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.”

“She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows been thrown open onto a brillant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover, laden with the most marvellous possibilities and opportunities.”

“They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.”

“Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.”

“Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you've got.”

“Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it resting there.”

“And the wicked thing is, that when we're really upset, we always take it out on the people who are closest and whom we love the most.”

“Oscar and I are very close, and yet I know that part of him is still withdrawn, even from me. As though part of him was still in another place. Another country. Journeying, perhaps. Or in exile. Across the sea. And I can't be with him, because I haven't got the right sort of passport.”

“It was better not to get too close to another person. The closer you got, the more likely you were to get hurt.”

“Not his real name, darling, but my own name for him. I never thought it could be like this. I never thought one could be so close, and yet so different to a single human being. He is everything I've never been, and yet I love him more than any person or anything I've ever known.”

“Life is sweet. . . Beyond the pain, life continues to be sweet. The basics are still there. Beauty, food and friendship, reservoirs of love and understanding. Later, possibly not yet, you are going to need others who will encourage you to make new beginnings. Welcome them. They will help you move on, to cherish happy memories and confront the painful ones with more than bitterness and anger.”

“She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one could wake with a totally clear and untroubled mind, as smooth and empty as a beach, washed and ironed by the outgoing tide.”

“Other people's houses were always fascinating. As soon as you went through the door for the first time, you got the feel of the atmosphere, and so discovered something about the personalities of the people who lived there.”

“Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.”

“For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.”

“I'm getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover.”

“I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.”

“He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will.”

“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.”

“Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything...Nothing happens without a reason...Nothing is impossible...(Page 180).”

“She appeared to be ageless the type that would continue, unchanging, until she was an old woman when she would suddenly become senile and die”

“It was good and nothing good is ever lost.”

“She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember.”

“She believed, of course ... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.”

“She put out her hand and touched his forearm, as she would have touched some piece of porcelain or sculpture, just for the sheer animal pleasure of feeling its shape and curve beneath her fingertips.”