“Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.”

“Time, Kate was learning, was like a river. You might put up obstacles, even divert it briefly, but the river had a will of it's own. It wanted to flow a certain way. You had to force it to change. You had to be willing to sacrifice.”

“I should like to know what sacrifices they make. I think it's the children who make the sacrifices. When I want to eat gooseberries and am not allowed to, the sacrifice is _mine_ not _Mother's_.”

“He ragarded her in surprise. This was a different tune from the one he'd expected to hear, certainly a change from the verse she'd sung when he was a boy. Commitment to ones' name, to one's heritage, to that which the sacrifices of others had made possible -- that was the song he used to hear from Aunt Mary. "Yes, I do," she said, "If I've learned anything by now, it's that some things are too priceless to sacrifice for a name." - Mary and William”

“He who would accomplish little need sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. He who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.”

“Sometimes love was not about winning, but about wise sacrifice and the realiability of friends like Arianne. Friendship, Roland realized, was its very own kind of love.”