Pilcher Quotes & Sayings

What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She had been impulsive all her life, made decisions without thought for the future, and regretted none of them, however dotty. Looking back, all she regretted were the opportunities missed, either because they had come along at the wrong time or because she had been too timid to grasp them. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She put out her hand and touched his forearm, as she would have touched some piece of porcelain or sculpture, just for the sheer animal pleasure of feeling its shape and curve beneath her fingertips. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She was totally without artifice. If she had nothing to say, she said nothing. If she spoke, or aired an opinion, it was deliberate, considered, intelligent. She did not seem to know the meaning of small talk, and while others chatted, over meals or an evening drink, she was always attentive, but often silent. Her relationships, however, were deeply affectionate and caring. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She appeared to be ageless the type that would continue, unchanging, until she was an old woman when she would suddenly become senile and die — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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 — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew it all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question, which from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Loving isn't finding perfection, but forgiving horrible faults. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember. — Rosamunde Pilcher

You never really got to know people properly until you had seen them within the ambiance of their own home. Seen their furniture and their books and the manner of their lifestyle. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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

I feel old and finished. I'm nearly thirty now. — Rosamunde Pilcher

And the wicked thing is, that when we're really upset, we always take it out on the people who are closest and whom we love the most. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Life is so extraordinary. Wonderful surprises are just around the most unexpected corners. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Oh. Elfrida made much effort not to appear too astonished. She had never seen any person in her life less likely to be a minister's wife. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The only way to make disasters bearable is to laugh about them. — Rosamunde Pilcher

There is no magic in all the world like that magic when you sell your first bit of writing. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She looked up and saw, high in the sky beyond the racing black clouds, a ragged scrap of blue sky. Enough to make a cat a pair of trousers. — Rosamunde Pilcher

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Oscar and I are very close, and yet I know that part of him is still withdrawn, even from me. As though part of him was still in another place. Another country. Journeying, perhaps. Or in exile. Across the sea. And I can't be with him, because I haven't got the right sort of passport. — 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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Are you going to ask me questions, Sheriff, or are you just going to sit there and think about how you're going to get into Doctor Graves' pants?"
"I can do both, Miss Pilcher," Jack said with a smile.
"I like you," she said, cackling. — Liliana Hart

Coach John Wooden20, one of the best basketball coaches and teachers of all time. To be effective teachers, he tells us "we have not taught students, until they have learned." We shouldn't judge our effectiveness by how much we teach, what we teach, and how we teach. Rather, we make a positive judgment if we've approached students every day knowing that our success depends on how well students learn. — Janet Pilcher

Beyond the pain, life continues to be sweet. The basics are still there. Beauty, food and friendship, reservoirs of love and understanding. Later, possibly not yet, you are going to need others who will encourage you to make new beginnings. Welcome them. They will help you move on, to cherish happy memories and confront the painful ones with more than bitterness and anger. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything ... Nothing happens without a reason ... Nothing is impossible ... (Page 180). — Rosamunde Pilcher

As long as Mumma was alive, she knew that some small part of herself had remained a child, cherished and adored. Perhaps you never completely grew up until your mother died. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual as sensuous, like wearing silk, or swimming without a bathing suit, or walking along a totally empty beach with the sun on your back. One was restored by solitude. Refreshed. — Rosamunde Pilcher

but also for the sweater most expertly knitted from hand-spun wool, — Rosamunde Pilcher

As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the ageold questions about suffering than with many of the easy or pious explanations offered from time to time. Some of which seem to verge on blasphemy. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them. — Rosamunde Pilcher

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality. — Rosamunde Pilcher

I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

As always, when faced with a dilemma, he planned to by by his own set of rules. Act positively, plan negatively, expect nothing. — Rosamunde Pilcher

It was good and nothing good is ever lost. — Rosamunde Pilcher

at seventy-seven, what did a few wrinkles matter? A small price to pay for an energetic and active old age. She drove in the last stake, — Rosamunde Pilcher

She had never lived alone before, and at first found it strange, but gradually had learned to accept it as a blessing and to indulge herself in all sorts of reprehensible ways, like getting up when she felt like it, scratching herself if she itched, sitting up until two in the morning to listen to a concert. — Rosamunde Pilcher

I'm getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Not his real name, darling, but my own name for him. I never thought it could be like this. I never thought one could be so close, and yet so different to a single human being. He is everything I've never been, and yet I love him more than any person or anything I've ever known. — Rosamunde Pilcher

For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand. — Rosamunde Pilcher

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Fear knocked at the door, Faith went to answer it, and no one was there. — Rosamunde Pilcher

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. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The air smelled of box and mint and thyme and newly turned earth. Laura — Rosamunde Pilcher

She always answered the questions in a vague fashion, partly because she didn't want to discuss the matter, and partly because she didn't know exactly how she did feel. Only that she had known, always, that life would be like this, because this was how it was for every British India family, and the children absorbed and accepted the fact that, from an early age, long separations and partings would, eventually, be inevitable. — Rosamunde Pilcher

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by. — Rosamunde Pilcher

One just had to be content with what had happened so far. — Rosamunde Pilcher

He straightened quickly and looked round at her. "Oh, Claire!" He patted the breast pocket of his shirt, making a hollow drumming — Robin Pilcher

This is the Death's-head Moth," he said. "That's nightshade she's sitting on - we're hoping she'll lay." The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes. "Acherontia styx," Pilcher said. "It's named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time - did I read that?" "Yes," Starling said. "Is it rare?" "In this part of the world it is. There aren't any at all in nature. — Thomas Harris

People today expect too much from marriage. Getting married is really like taking on a big new job. — Rosamunde Pilcher

I know we didn't have very long together, but what we did have was special. Not many people achieve such happiness, even for a year or two. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Oh well. Better out than in, — Rosamunde Pilcher

She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one could wake with a totally clear and untroubled mind, as smooth and empty as a beach, washed and ironed by the outgoing tide. — Rosamunde Pilcher

It was better not to get too close to another person. The closer you got, the more likely you were to get hurt. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She had never allowed herself to be bullied, and was not about to start. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Being financially secure is truly a life-enhancer; it sweetly oils the wheels of life. But remember: to talk of money, the excess of it or the lack of it, is vulgar to the extreme. One either boasts or whines, and neither makes for good conversation. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Mrs. Plackett did not believe in letting emotion show. Keep yourself to yourself had always been her motto. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you've got. — Rosamunde Pilcher

[Describing an unsatisfactory apartment for which an up-and-comer had to settle:] The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Time had lost its importance. That was one of the good things about getting old: you weren't perpetually in a hurry. All her life, Penelope had looked after other people, but now she had no one to think about but herself. There was time to stop and look, and, looking, to remember. Visions widened, like views seen from the slopes of a painfully climbed mountain, and having come so far, it seemed ridiculous not to pause and enjoy them. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. — H.G.Wells

She may not have believed in God, but I'm pretty certain God believed in her. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Before Elfrida Phipps left London for good and moved to the country, she made a trip to Battersea Dogs' Home, and returned with a canine companion. It took a good, and heart-rending, half hour of searching, but as soon as she saw him, sitting very close to the bars of his kennel and gazing up at her with dark and melting eyes, she knew he was the one. She did not want a large animal, nor did she relish the idea of a yapping lap dog. This one was exactly the right size. Dog size. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Other people's houses were always fascinating. As soon as you went through the door for the first time, you got the feel of the atmosphere, and so discovered something about the personalities of the people who lived there. — Rosamunde Pilcher

He thought back over the extraordinarily coincidental chain of events that had brought him here, at this particular time, and then left him marooned, so that he had no choice but to stay. With hindsight, it seemed as though it had all been carefully mapped out by fate. — Rosamunde Pilcher

He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will. — Rosamunde Pilcher

I'm not terribly intelligent - I have no university degree, you know. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Life, for both of us, can never be the same as it was, but it can be different; and you have proved to me that it can be good. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She believed, of course ... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable. — Rosamunde Pilcher

She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows been thrown open onto a brillant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover, laden with the most marvellous possibilities and opportunities. — Rosamunde Pilcher