Quotes from Rosamunde Pilcher

Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you've got.

Life is so extraordinary. Wonderful surprises are just around the most unexpected corners.

I'm not terribly intelligent - I have no university degree, you know.

You never really got to know people properly until you had seen them within the ambiance of their own home. Seen their furniture and their books and the manner of their lifestyle.

She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons.

Being financially secure is truly a life-enhancer; it sweetly oils the wheels of life. But remember: to talk of money, the excess of it or the lack of it, is vulgar to the extreme. One either boasts or whines, and neither makes for good conversation.

She appeared to be ageless the type that would continue, unchanging, until she was an old woman when she would suddenly become senile and die

She was totally without artifice. If she had nothing to say, she said nothing. If she spoke, or aired an opinion, it was deliberate, considered, intelligent. She did not seem to know the meaning of small talk, and while others chatted, over meals or an evening drink, she was always attentive, but often silent. Her relationships, however, were deeply affectionate and caring.

She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows been thrown open onto a brillant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover, laden with the most marvellous possibilities and opportunities.

Living, now, had become not simple existence that one took for granted, but a bonus, a gift, with every day that lay ahead an experience to be savoured. Time did not last forever. I shall not waste a single moment, she promised herself. She had never felt so strong, so optimistic. As though she was young once more, starting out, and something marvellous was just about to happen.

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 business, making telephone calls, writing letters, going for walks, breathing, seeing. It was the telling that killed.

I'm getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover.

She had been impulsive all her life, made decisions without thought for the future, and regretted none of them, however dotty. Looking back, all she regretted were the opportunities missed, either because they had come along at the wrong time or because she had been too timid to grasp them.

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning.

Life, for both of us, can never be the same as it was, but it can be different; and you have proved to me that it can be good.

The only way to make disasters bearable is to laugh about them.

Oscar and I are very close, and yet I know that part of him is still withdrawn, even from me. As though part of him was still in another place. Another country. Journeying, perhaps. Or in exile. Across the sea. And I can't be with him, because I haven't got the right sort of passport.

Man's inhumanity to man, unleashed, was an obscenity, and that obscenity was each person's own private responsibility.

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 weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

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 verge on blasphemy.

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 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.

Her companionship had saved his reason, and in her own uncomplicated way she had got him through the blackest times, comforting by simply accepting his limitations.

You know, it won't ever be like this again. Not ever. Just you and me, and this place and this time. Things only happen once.