She was always left feeling like a murderer. Because the messenger becomes the murderer. Until the fatal words are spoken, the loved one concerned is still alive, waking, sleeping, going about his bus...
Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not...
Mrs. Plackett did not believe in letting emotion show. Keep yourself to yourself had always been her motto.
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we l...
Beyond the pain, life continues to be sweet. The basics are still there. Beauty, food and friendship, reservoirs of love and understanding. Later, possibly not yet, you are going to need others who wi...
She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons.
Nothing’s worth anything unless somebody wants it.
Love she had found, had a strange way of multiplying. Doubling, trebling itself, so that, as each child arrived, there was always more than enough to go around.
For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.
She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one coul...
One just had to be content with what had happened so far.
At seventy-seven, what did a few wrinkles matter? A small price to pay for an energetic and active old age. She drove in the last stake,
She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitt...
It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever
As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the ageold questions about suffering than with many of the easy or pious explanations offered from time to time. Some of which seem to ve...
Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual...
Have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful nor think to be beautiful.
[Describing an unsatisfactory apartment for which an up-and-comer had to settle:] The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action.
The only way to make disasters bearable is to laugh about them.
She looked up and saw, high in the sky beyond the racing black clouds, a ragged scrap of blue sky. Enough to make a cat a pair of trousers.