Quotes by Menna van Praag

When you follow your heart you allow miraculous possibilities to unfold.

The heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, it cannot know love without also knowing loss.

It takes great courage and determination, to keep looking for light in all the darkness of life.

The only way to stop hurting other people is to stop hurting yourself.

I long fora little life,an everyday life,a splash of sunlightthrough a windowa smile from a stranger -a heart to hold in mine.

Its always best to feel fulfilled first, before finding a man. Then youll know the value of yourself, and youll hold the key to your own happiness. So you wont turn into a vulnerable, needy, emotional mess the minute you fall in love.

After hes gone Greer sits for a long time. She rests her head on her knees and weeps - not because she loved Blake and not because shes lost him. But because she did not care of herself. She knew Blakes nature the moment she met him, just as she knew the philandering fiancé. She knew them and she knew herself. Greer thinks of the story of the scorpion and the frog, and she knows she cannot blame these men for her messy life, they only did what she always knew they would do. No, this is not about crushed hopes and broken dreams. This is about trusting her own heart. Hope doesnt even enter into it.

It’s not just the books Alba craves, it’s standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba’s churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.

“Its a great shame, she thinks, that the heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, that it cannot know love without also knowing loss.”