My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.
There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.
She was not sorry. And if it was the wine telling her that, then she would tell the wine the same thing tomorrow. She was not sorry.
But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.
Life is a precious possession…It is what one makes of it. – Charity Duncan
Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.
Ah, but dreams cannot be captured with promises,” he said. “Like water, they elude our grasp. But water is the staff of life. I believe your dream will come true if only because you will not compromise on it and let it go too lightly.
The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?
Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.
You really love me?” she asked wistfully.”The devil!” he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. “Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?
I prefer to believe the opposite – that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.
One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest.
Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.
His friend laughed. ‘You missed your calling, Freddie,’ he said. ‘You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.
You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.
But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams.
People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it.
But that is what life is all about, he said. “It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination – and love.
But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong.
And so silence and …darkness hold happiness and joy?” he said softly.”Assuredly,” she said, “provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything.
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?
Except that love – that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power – could not possibly be contained in a single word.
One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.
Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.
But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?
Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.
The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.
The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.
But there were certain moments in life that forever defined one as a person – in one’s own estimation, anyway. And one’s own self esteem, when all was said and done, was of far more importance than the fickle esteem of one’s peers.
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one’s one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.
We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.
It is stronge how smells can bring back vivid memories.
Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?
I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.
Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.
She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it.
There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it.What the devil was the reason?
She had made reason and common sense her gods. She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she unstood to be her mentors.
And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but …alive.
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.
Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.
But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.
If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears.
Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.
Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?
Why is it,” she asked, snuggling closer, “that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
I am still not used to being the possessor of such a grand title. I believe I shall have to start wearing a purple satin turban and carrying a lorgnette.
After a few awkward moments, Lizzy joined them and they skipped along the avenue, the three of them, laughing and whooping and altogether making an undignified spectacle of themselves.
Always guarding one’s real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.Life itself had become a secret affair.
My mind cannot grasp forever,” she told him. “There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end?
Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?
It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.
Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not – most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.