“Your own gown is most delicately suitable, both to the occasion and to yourself,' to be translated: Your gown is insipid and entirely forgettable. If you wear it on every other occasion this entire season, no one will notice or care.”

“Monk had a brief vision of what it must be like to be a women on her own, obliged to work at pleasing people because your acceptance, perhaps even your financial survival, depended upon it. There must be hundreds - thousands - of petty accommodations, suppressions of your own beliefs and opinions because they would not be what someone else wished to hear. What a constant humiliation, like a burning blister on the heel which hurt with every step.And on the other hand, what a desperate loneliness for a man if he ever realized he was alway being told not what she really thought or felt but what she believed he wanted to hear. Would he then ever trust anything as real, or of value?”

“Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.”

“Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.”

“Can one be both barbarian of the soul and sophisticated of the mind?”

“Love is brave and generous and above all it springs from honor. In order to love someone else, you must first be true to yourself. Love is not two people wanting or needing what the other can give.--Hester Latterly”

“To take for granted one's blessings is a damage to the soul, and in time one will lose them, simply from lack of care. One should never tire of nourishing and treasuring all that is lovely.”