Hope is a strange commodity. It is an opiate. We swear we have relinquished it and, lo, here comes a day when, all unannounced, our enslavement to it returns.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.

And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.