“A Love like this happens but once in a lifetime”

“Youth comes but once in a lifetime”

“He said there are thousands of Shadowhunters, but great love comes once in a lifetime if one is lucky, and one would be a fool to let it go.”

“Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.”

“Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?”

“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”

“My real friend was my first wife. I could share everything with her without exception. That's how it came together that she became both a wife and a friend. A friend in the full sense of the word happens once in a lifetime or does not happen at all.”

“Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.”

“Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.”

“Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.”