...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.