Rosamunde Pilcher

“Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.”

“I'm not terribly intelligent - I have no university degree, you know.”

“Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.”

“On the contrary, she was aware only of a sort of timelessness, as though it was all part of a plan, a predestined design, conceived the day she was born. What was happening to her had been meant to happen, what was going to go on happening. Without any recognizable beginning, it did not seem possible that it could ever have an end.”

“Love she had found, had a strange way of multiplying. Doubling, trebling itself, so that, as each child arrived, there was always more than enough to go around.”

“She was always left feeling like a murderer. Because the messenger becomes the murderer. Until the fatal words are spoken, the loved one concerned is still alive, waking, sleeping, going about his business, making telephone calls, writing letters, going for walks, breathing, seeing. It was the telling that killed.”

“There is no magic in all the world like that magic when you sell your first bit of writing.”

“Her family... Love and involvement brought joy, but as well could become a hideously heavy millstone slung about one's neck. And the worst was that she felt useless because there was not a mortal thing she could do to help resolve their problems.”

“It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever”

“In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books.”

“Life for women in rural Scotland is not like anywhere else in the world. We all live very far apart, and you don't just ring your girlfriend up for a cup of coffee. There really is no sense of community, no pubs, no clubs. The golf clubs are male prerogatives, and the women are isolated and have to have their own resources.”

“The two most wonderful things in life are money and sex, but the minute you start discussing them, they become b-o-r-i-n-g.”

“Not having a father always made you feel that perhaps you weren't quite the same as other people. You felt you weren't complete.”

“People today expect too much from marriage. Getting married is really like taking on a big new job.”

“I never expect anything from anybody. I'm a bit Scottish like that - I don't like to be disappointed and let down. I like to take life very slowly.”

“She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons.”