Quotes from Rosamunde Pilcher

Just remember that the most important thing is to be truthful to yourself. If you hang on to that, you won't go far wrong.

For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence.

have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful nor think to be beautiful.

On the contrary, she was aware only of a sort of timelessness, as though it was all part of a plan, a predestined design, conceived the day she was born. What was happening to her had been meant to happen, what was going to go on happening. Without any recognizable beginning, it did not seem possible that it could ever have an end.

One just had to be content with what had happened so far.

Mrs. Plackett did not believe in letting emotion show. Keep yourself to yourself had always been her motto.

Describing an unsatisfactory apartment for which an up-and-comer had to settle:] The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action.

Grief was not a state of mind, but a physical thing, a void, a deadening blanket of unbearable pain, precluding all solace.

And all at once it was as it had been before, on that gusty August day during the war, and she was twenty-three years old again, with holes in her sneakers, and Papa sitting beside her. And Richard walked in; into the gallery and into their lives. And Papa told him, They will come...to paint the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. And that was how it had all begun.

He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will.

I know we didn't have very long together, but what we did have was special. Not many people achieve such happiness, even for a year or two.

Nothing's worth anything unless somebody wants it.

As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the age-old 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. I hope so much that no one has sought to try and comfort you by saying that God must have needed Francesca more than you. I would find it impossible to worship a God who deliberately stole my child from me. Such a God would be a moral monster.

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.

Elfrida, are you about to cry? - I might be. - Why? - Relief. ?

You mustn't think so far ahead. Just think about tomorrow, and then take one thing at a time.

He thought back over the extraordinarily coincidental chain of events that had brought him here, at this particular time, and then left him marooned, so that he had no choice but to stay. With hindsight, it seemed as though it had all been carefully mapped out by fate.

disaster relayed is often more frightening than the horror itself

It was going to be all right. There were to be no histrionics. For this deliverance Olivia was deeply grateful, but she felt sad too, because it is always sad when someone you have known as a child finally grows up, and you know that they will never be truly young again.

She stared at him, accepting for the first time the fact that personal tragedy is just that. Personal. Your own existence could fall to pieces but that did not mean that the rest of the world necessarily knew about it, or even bothered." ? Rosamunde Pilcher, The Empty House

Yes, she was lovely. But more than that, she was warm and funny and loving. Hot-tempered one moment, and laughing the next. And she could make a home anywhere. She carried a sort of security about with her. I can't think of a single person who didn't love her. I still think about her every day of my life. Sometimes she seems very dead. And other times, I can't believe that she isn't somewhere in the house and that a door won't open and she'll be there.

As always, when faced with a dilemma, he planned to by by his own set of rules. Act positively, plan negatively, expect nothing.

the sound of her laughter brought back, with a piercing clarity, ringing across the years, the memory of other laughter, and the unexpected ecstasies and physical joys that happen, perhaps, only once in any person's lifetime.