Susanna Kearsley
As a former waitress myself, I know firsthand how a simple smile from someone can improve your day and how a single harsh word can destroy it. Being courteous and thoughtful costs you nothing and can sometimes pay you dividends in unexpected ways.Collection: Smile
After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.Collection: Beauty
A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.Collection: Wedding
People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.Collection: Wedding
I believe there are no random meetings in our lives – that everyone we touch, who touches us, has been put in our path for a reason. The briefest encounter can open a door, or heal a wound, or close a circle that was started long before your birth.Collection: Believe
The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.Collection: Life
But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren't always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.Collection: Disappointment
It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.Collection: Past
Hope rarely enters into it. 'Tis action moves the world.Collection: Moving
So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.Collection: Heart
Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them," he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.Collection: Relationship
I do promise that you will survive this. Faith, my own heart is so scattered round the country now, I marvel that it has the strength each day to keep me standing. But it does,' she said, and drawing in a steady breath she pulled back just enough to raise a hand to wipe Sophia's tears. 'It does. And so will yours.' 'How can you be so sure?' 'Because it is a heart, and knows no better.Collection: Country
Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.Collection: Moving
Tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories.Collection: Memories
If it is true that men have souls that do survive them, he went on, ignoring me, and if those souls are born again to life, you need not worry that my ghost will haunt you. I'll haunt you in the flesh, instead.Collection: Men
Whatever time we have," he said, "it will be time enough.Collection: Enough
Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.Collection: Might
The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.Collection: World
A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.Collection: Grieving
..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.Collection: Song
Ye'll never best your fears until ye face themCollection: Faces
When I meet a wind I cannot fight , I can do naught but set my sails to let it take me where it will.Collection: Fighting
Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.Collection: Fighting
There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment.Collection: Thinking
Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.Collection: Men
These are your beautiful days, Julia Beckett," he promised softly.Collection: Beautiful