Quotes from Rosamunde Pilcher

sloped down to distant cliffs; farmland, ribboned with yellow gorse, broken by outcrops of granite, and patchworked into dozens of small fields. Like a quilt, thought Virginia, and saw the pasture fields as scraps of green velvet, the greenish gold of new-cut hay as shining satin, the

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

What's this? Bacon and tangerines. We are going to have an orgy.

Her family... Love and involvement brought joy, but as well could become a hideously heavy millstone slung about one's neck. And the worst was that she felt useless because there was not a mortal thing she could do to help resolve their problems.

The past is another country, but the journey could be made.

It occurred to her then that people went on living until somebody told you they were dead. Perhaps it was a pity that anybody ever told anybody anything.

The Scottish clan system was an extraordinary thing. No man was any man's servant, but part of a family. Which is why your average Highlander does not walk through life with a chip on his shoulder. He is proud. He knows he is as good as you are, and probably a good deal better.

Oh well. Better out than in

She cared for everybody, and yet for no person's opinion.

Uncertainty is always hell.

but also for the sweater most expertly knitted from hand-spun wool

Loving a person, she [Rachael] had told herself, is not finding perfection, but forgiving faults. ['Someone To Trust']

That is how it was with them. A closeness, a rapport that was almost entire, except for these small niggling uncertainties which, most of the time, she [Janey Ashcroft] was able to ignore, but sometimes, like tonight, grew like balloons to such size and importance that she wondered how she was going to be able to cope with them. ['Anniversary']

I always thinks that a garden is the best sort of legacy a person can leave. [Caroline, 'Skelmerton']

But being with someone you love isn't being with people. It's like being with the other half of yourself. [Julie, 'The Stone Boy']

The worst thing that can befall a family is to have its mother in hospital. The entire world becomes disoriented, the home has lost its heartbeat, there is no answer when you call. [Victoria, 'Magic Might Happen']

There was, Julia Prescott decided, only the finest razor-edge between depression and despair. Depression had been constant for weeks, familiar, creeping up on her like a prowler in tennis shoes. But despair was the dreaded spectre behind the closed door, springing forth just when you least expected it. ['Through the Eyes of Love']

The more tenuous the ties that hold us together, the easier it is to say goodbye. [Julia, 'Harbour of Love']

The air smelled of box and mint and thyme and newly turned earth. Laura

It's all so sweet. Needing each other and finding each other.

And in this life, nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character.

Which was strange, like watching a tangle of loose threads unravel and plait themselves into a single braided cord, stretching ahead into the future.

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.

Oh." Elfrida made much effort not to appear too astonished. She had never seen any person in her life less likely to be a minister's wife.