“There is something infinitely better than happily-ever-after. There is happiness. Happiness is a living, dynamic thing, Eve, and has to be worked on every moment for the rest of our lives. It is a far more exciting prospect than that silly static idea of a happily-ever-after. Would you not agree?" - Aidan Bedwyn”

“There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.”

“Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.”

“One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up.”

“Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.”

“If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.”

“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?”