What makes a Quotable Quote?

Do you ever highlight a phrase or copy down a sentence that captivates you?
I know that I do, and so do the readers of my two books, The Housemaid's Daughter and The Girl from Simon's Bay. Sometimes, though, the bits that get noticed are not necessarily the ones that I laboured the longest and hardest over - or was the proudest of! (excuse the tortuous grammar).


Cathleen Harrington, the Irish matriarch in The Housemaid's Daughter, keeps a diary in which she confesses her deepest thoughts. She isn't aware that her young housemaid, Ada, the heroine of the book, begins to read the diary during her daily duties. Ada struggles at first, because her reading ability is poor.
TomorrowIsailforAfrica...
After many times of struggling, I began to separate the words.
Tomorrow I sail for Africa...
The diary became a secret conversation between Madam and me.

Cathleen's diary teaches Ada valuable lessons in life and love.
I remind myself that wherever one finds oneself,
home and love is lent to each of us only for a while.
We must care for it while it's ours, and cherish its memory once its gone.

In The Girl from Simon's Bay, Louise Ahrendts is forced to give up the man she has fallen in love with during the Second World War. He is unaware that she is holding on to a secret. Some twenty years later, faced with eviction from her home, she wonders if she dare contact him again. But what would she say?
Dear David,
You can't have me, but here is our son...