Rose Tremain

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

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.

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

We have to become the people we always should have been.

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

Inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all we know how to make.

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existance is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, witch is free.