“This parting cannot be for long; for those who love as we do cannot be parted. We shall always be united in thought, and thought is a great magnet. I have often spoken to thee of reason, now i speak to thee of faith”

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.

What is done can never be undone.

Bookstores see a book by a woman and they put it in the romance section.

Elizabeth studied the blurry tabloid photo, which showed her cousin Mary Stuart leaving a Paris disco at dawn, drunkenly clinging to the arm of a French tennis pro. The message was very clear. Put passion first and you end up neither loved nor respected.

My dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.

Priceless things matter not for their value, but because they offer us an enduring reminder of stability and permanence.

Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.

When you are a strong woman, you will attract trouble. When a man feels threatened, there is always trouble.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

In my opinion, moderation is a vastly overrated virtue, particularly when applied to work

I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it’s none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can’t wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.

Elizabeth lay face-down on the massage table, and allowed Marco to relieve the stress of the business day with firm and knowing fingers. Success, she decided, was often a matter of knowing when to relax.

He who ascends to mountaintops, shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind Must look down on the hate of those below

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will – Montaigne, Essays

She put her hand in his, and he clasped it firmly, knowing he had been waiting for her all his life.

A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.

If you look at the common denominator of all the comics who have had big success, it’s being true to their nature… that’s what takes a long time to learn.

I don’t have a specific plan except for as long as people want to listen to me talk, I’m going to keep talking. I can’t imagine a life without doing standup.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.