We're not meant for happiness, you and I.

He stole horses' you'll say to yourself, 'and he didn't care for women; and but for my pride I'd have been with him now.

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, an that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire." (From Rebecca)

I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.

If you think I'm one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong. I'm invariably illtempered in the early morning.

... and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.