“Autumn can be glorious but menacing too – the long shadows, brisk winds, scurrying leaves, impending frost.”

You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it.

There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she’s given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take.

We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days – our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency.

We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions – and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.

Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were.

Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.

Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.

As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.

The experience you’ve had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it.

In asserting that people don’t change, what she means is that they don’t change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying.

Every shrink knows that it’s not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning.

In spite of what anyone says it’s women who make the rules.

It’s a known fact that in certain contexts people’s great strengths become their epic failings.