He was insulting her sex but complimenting her personally. Was she supposed to simper with gratitude?
He loved me, she said, her voice leaden. It is so easy to take love for granted when one has always had it. I knew he loved me as I loved him, but I did not realize perhaps how much until all love was...
Good Lord, even to his own ears they sounded like a pair of coconspirators being so overhearty in their enthusiastic simulation of innocence that they proclaimed themselves as guilty as hell.
Forever is not granted to any of us, the duchess said. Even tomorrow is not granted as by right. Any of us can go at any moment.
Dreams are wishes that will in all probability never come true. (Sophie)
But hell need not be eternal unless one chooses to make it so.
Bruce lamented the fact that she had not arrived sooner, when they had really needed her. I came as soon as I had your letter, she said. And I think I was able to do something to cheer the children. I...
Ben walked into the house and up the stairs with his two canes, but he propelled himself about much of the time after that in a wheeled chair, having decided that it was not an admission of defeat but...
And so he drifted back to London... where he lived a life of increasingly busy idleness as he searched out one diversion after another
All people, he thought with a sigh as he left the room, had their own demons to be fought—or not fought. Perhaps that was what life was all about. Perhaps life was a test to see how well we deal with...
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.
A funny thing, love. It was not always, or even mostly, a sexual thing.
When one had taken that first determined step out into the rest of one’s life, one had to keep on striding forward—or retreat and be forever defeated.
You have a disconcerting way of looking at me so directly that I feel as though you could see right through into my soul, Mr. Cunningham, she said. I suppose it is the artist in you.
We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts...
We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
The price of love, she thought, was pain. Was it worth it? Was it better not to love at all?
That is the excitement of life, he said when he was finished. The not knowing. It is often best not to know.
Suffering can kill. Not always physically. But it can kill dreams and it can deaden hope and the will to live.