It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.

But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.

But parents, she supposed, were not the pinnacle of perfection their children thought or expected them to be. They were humans who usually did the best they could but often made the wrong choices.

I'm terrified that I will never be able to put him from my mind. I don't love him but I'm afraid that he will make it impossible for me ever to love anyone else.

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.

Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.

And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn," he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. "And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.