You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.