Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word ... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.

There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.

She long ago accepted the fact that happiness is like, swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it.

"Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it".