“I have read somewhere that we often spend a lifetime searching for what we already have.”

“Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?”

“My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.”

“...but most roads I have learned from past experience lead somewhere eventually.”

“When we last out at ourselves for having lost control, we are reminded that we never can be in total control, that all life asks of us is to do our best to cope with what is handed to us.”

“I think it is more tha6 the sea is a reminder of how little control we have over our own lives no matter how carefully we try to plan and order them. Everything changes in ways we least expect, and everything is frighteningly vast. We are so small.”

“Unfortunately, Sir Gerald, people rarely get what they deserve in this life. Perhaps that is why we have had to invent a heaven. - Miss Blythe, A Precious Jewel”