Ah, these double meanings,” she said. “Who invented the English language, I wonder? He did not do a stellar job of it, whoever he was.
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.
You have love all wrong, Gwendoline. It is not all give, give, give. It is taking as well. It is allowing the other one the pleasure and joy of giving. Let me love you.
There is something about boys,” she said, “that makes them think it is unmanly to show any feelings other than scorn and irritation or any enthusiasm for anything. It is a very unattractive trait.
It was beginning to feel like an almost familiar place to be. But perhaps hitting this new low had something to be said for it, she thought now, this morning, after she had awoken and realized in some surprise that she had slept for several hours. At least now there was no further down to go. And.
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.
The best way to cope with pain was to pass it on to someone else.
Viscount Darleigh was charming as well as handsome, and he had the uncanny ability to look in the direction of the person who was speaking almost as if he could see that person. He moved about with the aid of a cane but with surprising confidence. It was clear that he had learned how to cope with his blindness at least within the confines of his own home.
Life is made up of opposing pairs – life and death, love and hatred, happiness and misery, light and darkness, and on and on into infinity. Finding balance and contentment is like trying to walk a tightrope between all those opposites without falling off on one side or the other and believing that life must be all light or all darkness, when neither one is truth in itself. Imogene.
But miracles did not always come in a single flash of time. Sometimes they came with every step forward one took when every instinct urged two steps back. Sometimes they came with the simple courage to say no longer, no more.
Miss Abigail Westcott, he had concluded during the past week, when he had watched her far more than he had wanted to and far more than was good for him, did most of her living inside herself. Like an iceberg, she showed the merest tip of her totality to the world, even her family. Perhaps especially to them. He wondered if they realized it.
Sometimes other people’s words become uncomfortable mirrors in which we gaze upon ourselves.
Sometimes her capacity for self-deception disturbed her.
One could not change the past anyway. Why let it blight the present and the future?
It was in idleness that one came face-to-face with the I AM. With simple, elemental Being.
There is a funny thing about tomorrow,” he said. “It never comes. Have you noticed? For when the day that ought to be tomorrow arrives, it is actually today. And today we are in love and planning to marry.
She would try to paint. She would always try, for the road to perfection held an irresistible lure, even if the destination remained always tantalizingly just beyond the farthest horizon.
And a strong man”, she said. “Strong enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to be honest even when honesty might expose him to ridicule or rejection. And someone who would put himself at the center of my world even before knowing that I would be willing to do the same for him. A man foolish and brave enough to tell me that he loves me even when I have hidden all signs that I love him in return.
I can see why men do not take up knitting and such. They would never be able to pluck up the courage to go and get what they needed.
I suppose,” he said, his voice harsher than he had intended it to be, “you want marriage again.” “No,” she said quickly. “No, never that. Not again. Why would any woman willingly make herself the property of a man and suffer all the humiliation of submerging her character and her very identity in his?