"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."

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

"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."

"She would live now, not read."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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…"

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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