“It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.”

“People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.”

“A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.”

“Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.”

“When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the 'bodice ripper.' It's the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.”

“It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.”

“As a former waitress myself, I know firsthand how a simple smile from someone can improve your day and how a single harsh word can destroy it. Being courteous and thoughtful costs you nothing and can sometimes pay you dividends in unexpected ways.”

“There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.”

“The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.”

“That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.”

“No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.”