“Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.”

“You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is not such a simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn't--unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature so familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise. ”

“I have invested my heart. There is a chance that it will be broken but also a chance at unlimited happiness.”

“But there was one other thing that the grown-ups also knew, and it was this: that however small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.”

“I am not one of those young ladies who are so daring to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time.”

“Tucked inside the moments of this great sadness - this feeling of being punctured, scrambling and stricken - were also moments of the brightest, most swollen and logic shattering happiness I've ever experienced. One moment would be a wall of happiness so tall it could not be scaled; the next felt like falling into a pit of sadness that had no bottom. I realized you could not have one without the other, that this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you - to tremble, always, on the edge of loss.”