* Life is very much like a garden, Olivia. And people are like tiny seeds, nurtured by love and friendship and caring. And if enough time and care are spent, they bloom into gorgeous flowers. And sometimes, even an old, neglected plant left in a yard gone to seed will unexpectedly burst into blossom. These are the most precious, the most cherished blossoms of all. - Garden of Shadows, VC Andrews

* You know, Corinne, relations between a man and a woman are more complicated than you can ever imagine. It's not just flowers and rainbows, though we might wish with all our hearts it were. As the poets have always told us, Love more resembles a rose, with harsh hurting thorns, beneath its bright, beautiful blossom. For some of us, the thorns are hardly noticeable, so sweet is the scent of the rose, but for others, the rose is small and shrivelled almost before it's blossomed, and we are left with a bush of thorns, like tiny needles poking into your heart.

*We are all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.

* Living with someone you love can be lonelier that living entirely alone ---
if the one that you love doesn't love you...

"When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves.
We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost.
That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."

Why did I love her? Because it was her. Because it was me.

SOMETIMES with the one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one
way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)