“Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping.""That's too easy," he said."On the contrary. It's monumentally difficult.”

“... there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes our actions and the consequences that follow both. There are only events how we cope with them and what we learn from the coping.”

“Hungry”, she said, “That’s what it’s like. Inside of me, always. This ... hunger that nothing is able to assuage. It’s horrible. It’s why I always feel ... well, empty. I know I can’t keep living this way, but I don’t know how to make the hunger stop.”“Perhaps you’re not meant to”, he said, “Perhaps you’re meant to cope with it. Either that or to come to realize that the hunger and the appeasement are two entirely different things. They’re unrelated. One will never quell the other.”She thought about this. She considered how much of herself – and the way she’d lived so long – had been tied up with a single unfulfilled desire. She finally said, “This is not who I want to be.”“Then be someone else.”Deborah/Lynley”

“Everything in our lives," she said quietly, "leads up to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you--as you are right now and as you ever wil be--are fully enough for this moment . . .”

“It's easy to make mistakes. It's living with the consequences of them that's the hardest.”

“She thought about how it was so simple with animals. They gave their hearts without question or fear. They had no expectations. They were so easy to love. If people could only be like that, no one would ever be hurt, she thought. No one would ever need to learn how to forgive.”

“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”