“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”

“Everyone had told her, since she became a princess-in-training, that she was very likely the most beautiful woman in the world. Now she was going to be the richest and the most powerful as well.Don't expect too much from life, Buttercup told herself as she rode along. Learn to be satisfied with what you have.”

“She siged, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.”

“A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death [the Stoics'] is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to despise life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, loss, and a Hamlet-like dread of death.”

“And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.”

“As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied”