If you can't be cheerful, be as cheerful as you can.

I believe flowers have souls. I have known roses that I expect to meet in heaven.

Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.

Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?

Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)

My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.

Anne "felt instinctively" that romance was peeping at her around a corner.