Mercy

Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home.

If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty. 

There are some weapons you can't protect yourself against.

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

After a while I couldn't remember whole pieces of you, as if part of the punishment was a recollection through a filter that grew hazier with time.

Allie knew the language of flowers - the idea every bloom stands for some quality of human nature.

I see us like we are in a movie, sometimes, except I'm not a participant, but someone watching the action.

If everyday flowed seamlessly into the next one for Cam, he'd never had to wonder, <i> What id? </i>

I have questions for you that I never got the chance to ask:
Do you look like you did back then? Would it make a difference, anyway?
Do you think of me, when you least expect it - when you are unwrapping a garden hose or tilting your face to the shower or making love to someone else? And can you leave it at that, or do you find yourself compulsively sifting through the memories?
If I had been the one to leave, would you have written out your heart to me?

For something to be real, it has to have an impact on the outside world.

<i> Why would have known that given the choice, he would not take the eaiest path after all? </i>

I want to talk to you, but I don't have the slightest idea what we would have to say.

'I told her that Frances would go when God wanted her. And' - he shook his head - 'Maggie said to me that if it was her, she'd want someone to wake God up and ask Him what the heck was keeping Him.'

How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else...


The way i see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust.

There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.

If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.

I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin.  And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

Paradise

You can't outwit fate by standing on the sidelines placing little sidebets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything you have to play the game or you don't play at all. And if u don't play u can't win. 


Beside him a tiny elderly woman was leaning on a cane, studying him with curiosity. Since good manners seemed to require that he speak to her, Jon cast about for some sort of polite conversation pertinent to the occasion. "I hate funerals, don't you?" He said.
"I rather like them," she said smugly. "At my age, I regard each funeral I attend as a personal triumph, because I was not the guest of honor."


Some people feel love in their hearts, Julie. Some of us feel it all way into our souls. We're the ones who can't forget. 


He will love only once - but it will be for always.


It isn’t what you say that counts, it’s what you don’t say” 


If you'll kiss me back," he whispered huskily, brushing his lips along the curve of her jaw, "I'll make it six million. If you'll go to bed with me tonight," he continued, losing himself in the scent of her perfume and the softness of her skin, "I'll give you the world. But if you'll move in with me," he continued, dragging his mouth across her cheek to the corner of her lips, "I'll do much better than that." 
Unable to turn her face farther because his arm was in the way and unable to turn her body because his body was in the way, Meredith tried to infuse disdain in her voice and simultaneously ignore the arousing touch of his tongue against her ear. "Six million dollars and the whole world!" she said in a slightly shaky voice. "What else could you possibly give me if I move in with you?" 
"Paradise." Lifting his head, Matt took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and forced her to meet his gaze. In an aching, solemn voice he said, "I'll give you paradise on a gold platter. Anything you want— everything you want. I come with it, of course. It's a package deal." Meredith wallowed audibly, mesmerized by the melting look in his silver eyes and the rich timbre of his deep voice. "We'll be a family," he continued, describing the paradise he was offering while he bent his head to her again. "We'll have children ... I'd like six," he teased, His lips against her temple. "But I'll settle for one. You don't have to decide now." She drew in a ragged breath and Matt decided he'd pushed matters as far as he dared for one night. Straightening abruptly, he chucked her under her chin. "Think about it," he suggested with a grin.” 

Secrets of a Summer Night

    "I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short."
    "We are hidiously rich Annabelle-- and I've got three older brothers, all unmarried. Would you consider one of them? If you like, I'll have one shipped across the Atlantic for your inspection."

The Tenth Circle

~What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

~All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.

~What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

~It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't. 

~Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued.

~The saddest day in the world will be the one when I stop pretending.

~He called dreams a 'royal road' into the unconscious, made up of all forbidden wishes you had and you wished you didn't

~As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

~You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if  your child was the one who burned it in the first place.

~But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted to bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.

~She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

~It was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

~The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

~It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

~There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

~She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.

~Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons.

~But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

~...he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter. She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Danielle could guess. These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.

~Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?

~It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.

~It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.

~There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.

~How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were?

~And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

~Is there anything more solid, more right, than knowing you child was where she ought to be?

~She knew all sorts of four letter words now; they just weren't the ones that most people considered foul language.
Love.
Help.
Rape.
Stop.
Then.

~How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I dont look like me?

~And yet, you never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

~These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

~There was a fine line between love and hate you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness one day to feel like an intrusion.

~What you notice is the loneliness.

~Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away.

~Given anything negative or uncertain, there were rules that had to be followed.

~I guess it's just so I remember where I started.

~A villain let your creativity out of its cage. The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.

~The catch was this: Power always involved loss of humanity.

~His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he had become in order to save her.

~Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting you hadn't completely given up.

~Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?

~There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them.

~Your child is hurt. How quickly can you make it better?
What if you can't?

~Danger came in different packages, at different points in a lifetime.

~Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?

~They were different places in that same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later.

~What Trixie wanted, most of all, what she couldn't have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

~May be the question we need to ask isn't whether there's any fresh twenty first century sin...but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.

~Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence.

~Silence was just a quieter way to lie.

~The age wasn't as important as the milestones.

~She wondered how big the world was, really, when you crossed it, instead of traced it with your finger on the map.

~Who would have imagine that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?

~Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?

~The problem with marriage - or may be its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later.

~Until then she hadn't considered that there was a trade off, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

~We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

~How could you pick, knowing that you'd have to go home and live with the choice you made?

~May be you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.

~It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us did a better job of hiding it than others.

~If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and may be see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

~May be it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.

~If she was getting anywhere on this journey, it was still the wrong way.

~She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.

~Because the more you changed, the less of you there was. What she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other 

~...as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.

~People move too fast and talk too much, and before you know it, they come back to a place they don't want to be - except now they know there's nowhere left to run.

~Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.

~It was a hairline crack, one might never have noticed, except for the fact it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them.

~A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

Once and Always

I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.

Scandal in Spring

"Daisy," Westcliff said gently,"most lives are not distinguished by great achievements. They are measured by an infinite number of small ones. Each time you do a kindness for someone or bring a smile to his face, it gives your life meaning. Never doubt your value, little friend. The world would be a dismal place without Daisy Bowman in it."

Northernger Abbey

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.


It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.


No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves, it is the woman only who can make it a torment.


It is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.

Hana Yori Dango

Love just kinda happens when you least expect it.

Patience is a virtue.

Turbulent Seas

Music burst through him, perfect notes he hear rarely.

Fire and ice, wind and calm, sky and earth, water and rock all fused together. Joley seemed as wild and turbulent as the sea, yet beneath her fiery passion, at the very core of her, she was as forceful and strong and as constant as the deepest ocean currents. Ilya seemed as calm as a windless sea, yet beneath the surface smoldered a volcano of such explosive magnitude, his power could easily sweep everything from his path. Together they completed each other, his melody and hers merging together into a single, perfect harmony.

 She didn't know how to love, to give herself to someone, to put herself in someone else's keeping and take him into hers. She didn't trust anyone with her heart - or the darker places of her soul.

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached.

She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, because she could never do that - love someone completely and survive intact if her left her.  

No Man's Mistress

     If there were no illusions, there would bo no disillusionment. But then one would have no fond memories either, with which fortify oneself against the pain of the reality. 
     The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.

Pleasures Of A Notorious Gentleman

Ainsley cleared his throat. "Allow me to apologize for my brother. He's not been himself since he returned home."
"With all due respect, Your Grace, I suspect he's being exactly himself. He's just simply no longer the person you knew before he left."

 ...words on paper are not the same as blood on hands.

Shame, when she was younger, had stopped her. Fear, as she grew older, trapped the truth within her.

How many times could a mother's heart break? An infinite number of times. Each time her children were hurt. She'd long ago accepted the pain of it, as well as the stoicism to never let it show. It was a mother's lot in life.

But she'd lost a good deal of her innocence there, because she'd discovered so much she couldn't control.

Life was a strange circle. She tried not to decipher it, but rather to accept it as it came.

Create a fog within a fog.

A pity we cannot pick and choose what we remember.

She'd been a silly girl then, full of childish dreams. Sometimes she missed that young girl.  

Sand Chronicles

Never break what you cherish, ok?  Never try to blow away your important feelings like that.

No matter how much you love her, no matter how long you guys have lived together. No matter in each person, there’s always a hidden corner that no one can touch.

Only one can save oneself.