Top 60 Rosamunde Pilcher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fear knocked at the door, Faith went to answer it, and no one was there.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

2. “Life is so extraordinary. Wonderful surprises are just around the most unexpected corners.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

3. “Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you’ve got.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

4. “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

5. “It was good and nothing good is ever lost.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

6. “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

7. “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

8. “And in this life, nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

9. “The Scottish clan system was an extraordinary thing. No man was any man’s servant, but part of a family. Which is why your average Highlander does not walk through life with a chip on his shoulder. He is proud. He knows he is as good as you are, and probably a good deal better.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

14. “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Grief was not a state of mind, but a physical thing, a void, a deadening blanket of unbearable pain, precluding all solace.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

18. “Loving isn’t finding perfection, but forgiving horrible faults.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

19. “I’m getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

20. “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

21. “Go and be happy.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Uncertainty is always hell.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

25. “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

26. “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

27. “It was going to be all right. There were to be no histrionics. For this deliverance Olivia was deeply grateful, but she felt sad too, because it is always sad when someone you have known as a child finally grows up, and you know that they will never be truly young again.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

28. “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

29. “She had loved them all, her children. Loved each one the best, but for different reasons.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

30. “Which was strange, like watching a tangle of loose threads unravel and plait themselves into a single braided cord, stretching ahead into the future.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

31. “Nothing’s worth anything unless somebody wants it.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

32. “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

33. “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

34. “She cared for everybody, and yet for no person’s opinion.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

35. “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

36. “What’s this? Bacon and tangerines. We are going to have an orgy.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

37. “Just remember that the most important thing is to be truthful to yourself. If you hang on to that, you won’t go far wrong.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

38. “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

39. “Man’s inhumanity to man, unleashed, was an obscenity, and that obscenity was each person’s own private responsibility.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

40. “And all at once it was as it had been before, on that gusty August day during the war, and she was twenty-three years old again, with holes in her sneakers, and Papa sitting beside her. And Richard walked in; into the gallery and into their lives. And Papa told him, “They will come... to paint the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind.” And that was how it had all begun.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

41. “On the contrary, she was aware only of a sort of timelessness, as though it was all part of a plan, a predestined design, conceived the day she was born. What was happening to her had been meant to happen, what was going to go on happening. Without any recognizable beginning, it did not seem possible that it could ever have an end.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

42. “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

43. “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

44. “She may not have believed in God, but I’m pretty certain God believed in her.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

45. “Perhaps that was the worst of all. Not having someone to remember things with.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

46. “Living, now, had become not simple existence that one took for granted, but a bonus, a gift, with every day that lay ahead an experience to be savoured. Time did not last forever. I shall not waste a single moment, she promised herself. She had never felt so strong, so optimistic. As though she was young once more, starting out, and something marvellous was just about to happen.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

47. “She stared at him, accepting for the first time the fact that personal tragedy is just that. Personal. Your own existence could fall to pieces but that did not mean that the rest of the world necessarily knew about it, or even bothered.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

48. “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

49. “As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the age-old 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. I hope so much that no one has sought to try and comfort you by saying that God must have needed Francesca more than you. I would find it impossible to worship a God who deliberately stole my child from me. Such a God would be a moral monster.”

— Rosamunde Pilcher

50. “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