"They weren't true stories; they were better than that."

"Remember what I've told you. Remember me."

"People want to ignore what they can't understand. They're looking for logic at any cost."

"Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen."

"He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one."

"In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients."

"It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found."

"You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it."

"He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted."

"She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future."

"Never look at other people's bad fortune,' my mother said. 'If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner."

If it wasn't for pick-pockets I'd have no sex life at all.

"Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows."

"The more you feel, the stronger you are."

"If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun."

"How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms."

"It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone — maybe even more alone — than I was…"

"I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live."

"This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed."

"He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky."

"Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you."

"The constant happiness is curiosity."

"The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming."

"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."

"Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later."

"Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?"

"She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements."

"He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life."

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."

"I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window."

"People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."

"Life would be grand if it weren't for the people."

"They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life."

"She would live now, not read."

"Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

"My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information."

"There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever."

"What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it"."

"Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person."

"You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never."

"We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time."

"Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?"

"What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."

"He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into."

"And now such a warm commotion, such busy love."

"Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class."

"There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done."