Mary Balogh Quotes

Love does not last forever, then?"
"He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.

She is not conventionally beautiful or accomplished or elegant," Magnus continued, "but she is attractive. She does not even know how much, but every man she meets feels it and is drawn to her. The thing is, though, that most ladies feel drawn to her too. So it is not flirtation, you see. It is simply the extraordinary attractiveness of her character." -Slightly Dangerous (Bedwyn Saga #6)

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

But there were certain moments in life that forever defined one as a person - in one's own estimation, anyway. And one's own self esteem, when all was said and done, was of far more importance than the fickle esteem of one's peers.

Sometimes sexuality was more compelling when it was not overt.

She would try to paint. She would always try, for the road to perfection held an irresistible lure, even if the destination remained always tantalizingly just beyond the farthest horizon.

But hell need not be eternal unless one chooses to make it so.

Where was Bewcastle?
But then he was there, standing on the terrace some distance away, and such was the power of his presence that everyone seemed to sense it an fell back away from Alleyne even as they stopped talking. There was still all sorts of noise, of course - horses, carriage wheels, voices, the water spouting out of the fountain - but it seemed to Alleyne as if complete silence fell.
Bewcastle had already seen him. His gaze was steady and silver-eyed and inscrutable. His hand reached for the gold-handled, jewel-studded quizzing glass he always wore with formal attire and raised it halfway to his eyes in a characteristic gesture. Then he came striding along the terrace with uncharacteristic speed and did not stop coming until he had caught Alleyne up in a tight, wordless embrace that lasted perhaps a whole minute while Alleyne dipped his forehead to his brother's shoulder and felt at last that he was safe.
It was an extraordinary moment. He had been little more than a child when his father died, but Wulfric himself had been only seventeen. Alleyne had never thought of him as a father figure. Indeed, he had often resented the authority his brother wielded over them with such unwavering strictness, and often with apparant impersonality and lack of humor. He had always thought of his eldest brother as aloof, unfeeling, totally self sufficient. A cold fish. And yet it was in Wulfric's arm that he felt his homecoming most acutely. He felt finally and compl

It is the gentleman's job to match his pace and his step to the lady's. men do not have. All the power in the world, you see, despite what women often believe.

But life and pain go hand and hand. On e cannot live fully unless one faces pain at least occasionally.

One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.

I never think that any writer can teach someone how to write.

If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.

Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.'
'There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.'
'Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.'
'And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.

And so he drifted back to London ... where he lived a life of increasingly busy idleness as he searched out one diversion after another

Eunice Goddard," he said, all pretense of sleepiness gone from his eyes, "will you marry me? I have no flowery speech prepared and would feel remarkably idiotic delivering it even if I had. Will you just simply marry me, my love? Because I love you? Will you take the risk? I am fully aware that there is a risk. I can only urge you to take a chance on me while I promise to do my very best to love and cherish you for the rest of my days and even perhaps beyond them.

war often wounds the soul as deeply as it does the body, sometimes more so.

Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.
Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.

You still do not quite understand, do you?" she said softly. "I do not want you to change. I fell head over ears in love with you the first time I saw you just because you are who you are.

Sometimes," he said, "it is necessary to go back before we can move forward.

One of the most horrible realities about the death of someone closely related, she remembered, was the necessity of going on almost immediately with the trivialities of living. As though nothing of any real significance had changed.

What sort of man could you love for a lifetime?" he asked her.
She was silent for a while. He guessed that she was considering her answer.
"A kind man," she said. "When we are young and foolish we do not realize how essential a component of love kindness is. It is perhaps the most important quality. And an honorable man. Always doing the right thing no matter what."
His heart sank-on both account.
"And a strong man," she said. "Strong enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to be honest even when honesty might expose him to ridicule or rejection. And someone who would put himself at the center of my world even before knowing that I would be willing to do the same for him. A man foolish and brave enough to tell me that he loves me even when I have hidden all signs that I love him in return."
"Eve-" he said.
"He would have to be tall and broad and dark and hook-nosed," she said. "And frowning much of the time, pretending he is tough and impervious to all the finer emotions. And then smiling occasionally to light up my heart and my life."
Good God!
"He would have to be you," she said. "no one else would do. Which is just as well, considering the fact that I am married to you...

Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.

Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?

To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations.

It is part of you, and you are a man worth knowing

Why have you done all this for me?" She turned her head to look at him. "Tell me the truth."

He shook his head slowly.

"I don't think I could have been more terrified of the devil than I was of you," she said, "when it was happening and in my thoughts and nightmares afterward. And when you came home to Willoughby and I realized that the Duke of Ridgeway was you, I thought I would die from the horror of it."

His face was expressionless. "I know," he said.

"I was afraid of your hands more than anything," she said. "They are beautiful hands."

He said nothing.

"When did it all change?" she asked. She turned completely toward him and closed the distance between them. "You will not say the words yourself. But they are the same words as the ones on my lips, aren't they?"

She watched him swallow.

"For the rest of my life I will regret saying them," she said. "But I believe I would regret far more not saying them."

"Fleur," he said, and reached out a staying hand.

"I love you," she said.

"No."

"I love you."

"It is just that we have spent a few days together," he said, "and talked a great deal and got to know each other. It is just that I have been able to help you a little and you are feeling grateful to me."

"I love you," she said.

"Fleur."

She reached up to touch his scar. "I am glad I did not know you before

But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong.

The only thing you can neither plan nor control, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, is love itself. When you find it, you must yield to it. But only if it is the one and only true passion of your life. Never if it is anything less than that, or life will consume you.
But how am I to know? She had asked him.
You will know.

When one had once suffered a great hurt, there was always a weakness afterward, a vulnerability where there had been wholeness and strength before - and innocence.

Everyone had run to do her bidding. Soon only the three men
the three useless ones
had been left in the sitting room to fight terror and nausea and fits of the vapors.
The door opened. Three pale, terrified faces turned toward it.
-the three manly men waiting during a childbirth

I do not believe there is right or wrong," he said. "there is only doing what one must do under given circumstances and living with the consequences and weaving every experiences, good and bad, into the fabric of one's life so that ultimately one can see the pattern of it all and accept the lessons life has taught.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.

You just have not...oh, learned who yo are yet.

Some things," she said, "are best not known for sure, Lord Trentham.

She hastily tried to shut the door. But his forearm shot up and held it open. They stared at each other for several silent moments. "What are you doing here?" she demanded at last. It was only at that moment that she realized Lady Baird was standing behind him. "Pitting my strength against yours to hold the door open," he said in his usual bored, rather haughty tone. "It is a battle you cannot win, Catherine. Let us in?

He was insulting her sex but complimenting her personally. Was she supposed to simper with gratitude?

I would be consumed by you,' she said, and blinked her eyes furiously when she felt them fill with tears. 'You would sap all the energy and all the joy from me. You would put out all the fire of my vitality.'
'Give me a chance to fan the flames of that fire,' he said, 'and to nurture your joy.

And then something blossomed deep within and opened almost like the multitude petals of a rose, pushing back the tension in rippling waves as they bloomed until she surrendered to relaxation with a soft exclamation of surprise

She looked at him, her eyes brimming with laughter again. Joel sat gazing at her, wondering how much attention she was drawing from the other occupants of the room. But, however much it was, she seemed unaware of it. He gazed back at her, more than a bit shaken, for she looked like a different woman when she laughed. She looked young and vivid and ...

What was the word his mind was searching for? Gorgeous? She was hardly that.

Stunning.

That was it. She looked stunning, and he was feeling a bit stunned. She made prettiness seem bland.

Her laughter quickly died, however. "You must have gathered enough information about me to paint a dozen pictures," she said, sounding suddenly cross. "I wish you would paint that infernal portrait and be done with it."

"So that you can be rid of me?" he said. "Alas, you would not be that even if I were ready to paint you tonight. We would still be sharing the schoolroom two afternoons each week. But I am not ready. The more I learn of you, the more I realize I do not know you at all. And, by your own admission, you do not know yourself either.

The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.

I believe," he said gently, "we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else's. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.

I have people introducing themselves to me: 'I am your publicist; what can I do for you?' But I have never learned how to use a publicist.

Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?

My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.

This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite."
"Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him.
"Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful ...

Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.

Sometimes love was to be grasped in any form and in any manner it was offered. And sometimes love must be given in the same way.

I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.

Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.
No one was shallow. Not really.

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.

Ah, but dreams cannot be captured with promises," he said. "Like water, they elude our grasp. But water is the staff of life. I believe your dream will come true if only because you will not compromise on it and let it go too lightly.

But they are good hands," he said, holding them up in the space between them, palms toward her. Slim hands, slender fingers, gold rings on four of them. Three of those fingertips had felled a man and left him gasping for survival. "They will protect you all the rest of my life and never hurt you. They will hold you and bring you comfort when you need it. They will hold our children. They will caress you and bring you pleasure. Come. Lie down on the bed." Our

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

If he ever grew to understand himself, Hugo decided, it would be a miracle of the first order. Not

You really love me?" she asked wistfully.
"The devil!" he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. "Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?

There are voices that are lovely for various reasons or annoying for other reasons [ ... ]

crowded about the four sides of the green to watch and cheer. Viola had set out from home early in the morning looking ladylike and elegant in a muslin dress and shawl and straw bonnet, her hair in a neatly braided coronet about her head beneath it. She had even been wearing gloves. But she had long ago discarded all the accessories. Even her hair, slipping stubbornly out of its pins during the busy morning of rushing hither and yon, had been allowed finally to hang loose in a long braid down

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.

As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.
But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too.

Idleness was so often despised. And yet it was on idleness, she knew, that one touched meaning and peace.

I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.

You are usually in a different universe," she said, "one that revolves about you. The Peninsula was full of rude, blustering officers who believed other people had been created to pay them homage. I always thought they were merely silly and best ignored.

there was many a slip twixt cup and lip.

[ ... ] a pearl probably does not look so very remarkable either while it is still hidden inside its shell.

with a cluster of other servants.

She was not sure that her deafness had strengthened her character. She was not even sure she had met a challenge. A silent world was as natural to her as a noisy one must be to them, she reflected. But people tended to assume that deaf persons could function as people only if they learned to conform to a world of sound. What about the challenge of silence? Very few people of hearing ever accepted it or even knew that there was a challenge there. People of hearing feared silence ...

Tis what marriage is all about, madam," he said. "Have you not realized it? 'Tis about discovering unknown facets of the character and experience and taste of one's spouse and learning to adjust one's life accordingly. 'Tis learning to hope that one's spouse is doing the same thing.

There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything.

If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears.

Your father is your f-father regardless, Agnes. Birth and b-breeding do not always depend upon small matters like who provided the seed.

But the things is, you see, that two people can never actually become one no matter how close they are. And it would not be desirable even if it were possible. What would happen when one of them died? It would leave the other as a half a person, and that would be a dreadful thing. We must each be a whole person and therefore we each need some privacy to be alone with ourselves and our own feelings.

The people we love are usually stronger than we give them credit for. It is the nature of love, perhaps, to want to shoulder all the pain rather than see the loved one suffer. But sometimes pain is better than emptiness. I have been so empty Kit. All my life. So full of emptiness. That is strange paradox is nit not - full of emptiness?

We can all be hurt.

Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo.
It just simply was.

He knew he was alive when he was with her, whatever the devil that meant.
Whatever the devil it did mean, it made all the difference.
And he was not even sure what that meant.

Tonight seems eons away, but there are these moments.

But really there was no hurry. It is time to love, he had said downstairs. And time was not always just one second long or even one minute or one hour. Those were artificial divisions, imposed by humankind. Time was infinite. And it was time to love ...
... Even infinity had an end. They had loved. And somehow having loved was quite as beautiful as loving. For of course there was no real end to it. Infinity might have an end, but love did not.

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

Leave love to take its course.

He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven - at least in this life - was neither a time nor a place
to be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again to
leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.
Very much on the verge of tears.
And very frightened.

I would not wish to deny you your dreams. But have a care. They can be dashed in one impulsive moment.

If she allowed herself to wallow in self-pity, she would be in danger of becoming one of those habitual moaners and complainers everyone avoided.

It was in idleness that one came face-to-face with the I AM. With simple, elemental Being.

Perhaps we should do the learning - and learn not to communicate, or to do it in a different way. Now there is a thought. Perhaps we could learn your peace if we could share your silence.

Did people ... really kiss like that? She had had NO idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naivete she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places

The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?

Sometimes one does wonder if one lives quietly from choice or if in reality one is merely waiting for something that may never come.

There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it.
What the devil was the reason?

You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.

The only thing over which we have any control whatsoever is the very next decision we make.

Sometimes, self-pity was so ingrained in people that nothing could persuade them to take joy out of living.

And then, when I was at my lowest ebb, you came. And you somehow coaxed me into talking to you as though you were a trusted confidant. And then you flirted with me. For a few moments you bore me off with you to the sunshine above the clouds in a hot air balloon, wrapped together in warm furs and bound for a place far, far away. And then you kissed me.

I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.

He watched her go, wondering if life ever offered happiness in more than very small, very brief doses. T

Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world.

Life is a precious possession ... It is what one makes of it. - Charity Duncan

(Edward describing Angeline's bonnet)
"Then it is overbright and those colors should never been seen togther upon the same person, not to mention the same garment ." he said. "And it actually suits you perfectly. It suits your character.

There is a l-life lesson here for all of us, is there, M-Mrs. Keeping?" he asked her. "We should all and always look upward, and all our t-troubles will be at an end?" She smiled. "If only life were that simple." "But for daffodils it is," he said. "We are not daffodils.