The best Quotes from Gift from the Sea

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

You mean well, but leave me be
Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free

If we are all alone, then that's also somthing we have together.

Because nothing sucks more than feeling all alone, no matter how many people are around.

If no one in the entire world cared about you, did you really exist at all?

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

We enter the world alone and we leave it alone. And everything that happens in between, we owe it to our self to find a little company. We need help. We need support. Otherwise we're in it by our self. Strangers, cut off from each other and we forget just how connect we all are. So instead we choose love. We choose life and for a moment we feel just a little bit less alone.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.
When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down "happy". They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.

That's the best revenge of all: happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good f*cking life.

The happiest people don't worry too much about whether life is fair ot not, they just get on with it.

It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking: How did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue. And maybe we can actually never have it, no matter what. How did he know that?

"But don't you think," I persist, "that it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

If you are happy, happiness will come to you. Because happiness wants to go where happiness is.

Walk until the darkness is a memory, and you become the sun on the next traveler's horizon.

Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.

"And what if there's nothing in there?"
"You die and there's nothing beyond that. Nothing. Nothing remains. Someone might remember you for a little while after but not for long."

There's only one thing that can save a man from madness and that's uncertainty.