The Forgotten Garden

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.

Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...

It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.

The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.

You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor." "I don't want to survive it." "I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...

...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

So much in life came down to timing.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.

Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types." "Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!

He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.

In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden

You mustn't wait for someone to rescue you, . . . . A girl expecting rescue never learns to rescue herself. Even with the means, she'll find her courage wanting.

Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.