All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?

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

Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world.

Your sense of guilt will linger. It will always be part of you. but sharing it, allowing people to love you anyway, will do you the world of good. Secrets need an outlet if they are not to fester and become an unbearable burden.

After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.

The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.