My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.

Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is.

Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.

A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.

I am free, you see," she said, "to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. that is why I love you and it is the way I love you. If you have come here, Kit, because you think you owe me something, because you believe I might crumble without your protection, then go away again with my blessing and find happiness with someone else." "I love you," he said again.

But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.

And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive.