Susanna Kearsley Quotes

But what you bring back with you in the end, he said, might not be what you started out in search of to begin with

...he raised a hand to touch my face, a touch of promise, warm and sure, and as I struggled to smile back at him he kissed me. It felt so very right, so beautiful; tears pricked behind my lashes as life flowed through all my hollow limbs, and I lost all sense of place and time. It might have been a minute or an hour...

Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.

Daddy could be rather difficult, at times, and he hadn't yet found any young man who measured up to his exacting standards. The best thing, I'd found, was simply not to introduce them to him. It saved a lot of bother, all around.

Even Austrian landladies recognise the hand of destiny at work.

And has the truth become the property of those who can afford it?' The

He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he'd be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and images.

Into the air. There was love here - not perfect, but strong,

For if there was no winter, we could never hope for spring.

Then, stop worrying so much what the rest of us think; just get on the damned donkey and ride it.

I couldn't stop it from happening," I told her. "I've been able to stop it before, but this time I just couldn't stop it from happening." "Well, now." Her blue eyes were very wise. "You've learned a valuable lesson from this, then, haven't you? You can't cheat fate, Julia. If you don't go looking for the lessons of the past, then the past will come looking for you.

Several minutes later, when I passed among the guests to fill their empty cups with wine, I found him standing at my shoulder. "You'll wound my pride," he warned me softly, "ignoring me so." I flicked him a look that was only half-impatient. "I must not speak with you, by my uncle's own instruction." "And when have you obeyed instructions?" He held out his own cup to be filled, his mouth curved in amusement. "Besides, your uncle is engaged at present, with a most serious gentleman. If he should look this way, I've only to duck my head." "You are impossible, my lord." "Ay. And your good humor is lacking, madam. What is it that has so offended you?

The markets of my memory were city markets, London markets, crammed into narrow streets or cobbled squares, with hoarse-voiced vendors hawking their wares and all around me the relentless press of people, people everywhere. It was a pleasant change to see the bright-striped awnings gaily ringing around the weathered market cross, and the sunlight beating cheerfully down upon the market square. There were crowds here too, to be sure, but these were friendly country folk, their voices clear and plain, with honest faces scrubbed red by the wind and weather.
"What do you think?" Rachel asked me.
I could only gape, wide-eyed, like an entranced child, and she laughed her lovely musical laugh, grabbing my hand to lead me down into the thick of the crowd. We were jostled and bumped, but I found I did not mind it, and to my amazement I heard myself laughing as the final shreds of oppression fell away from me. The breeze lifted my hair and the sun warmed my face, and I felt suddenly, gloriously alive.

Is it your wish that I should leave you now?" "Why would you think that of me?" His eyebrows rose, the vulnerability gone. "You are not a servant, Mariana, to be thus ordered from my sight." "No," I admitted, looking down at my feet, "I am not a servant. I am a mistress. A minor difference, I'll grant you." His eyes were steady on my face. "You are my love," he corrected me, softly, "and there is no shame in that. Do you wish this afternoon undone?" I raised my head. "No," I told him honestly. "I will not force you to my bed," he said. "I do not want a frightened woman, nor a coy one, but one who gives me love because she wills it so. If I make no promises, it is because the world is an uncertain place, and words matter little. But if you doubt the honor of my love, come," he stretched his hand towards me, palm upward, "let me renew my pledge.

But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren't always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.

I tasted the salt on my own lips, and the bitter taste of blood on his. It was a desperate kiss, the sort of kiss that marks a lovers' parting, a kiss of sorrow and regret and a kind of blind and wordless promise. I would have risen up when it was finished, but he held me close, his hand stroking my hair. "I'll hurt your chest," I protested, but he shook his head. "I am past pain," he lied, "and I've always had a fancy to die in my lover's arms. 'Tis most romantic.

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.

I love to read, but all through school I hated it when books were pulled apart and analyzed. Winnie-the-pooh as a political allegory, that sort of thing. It never really worked for me. There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her that when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment."

'The Winter Sea

Damn and blast!" "Curates can't use language like that," I reminded my brother, and he grinned involuntarily. "I'm getting it out of my system," was his excuse.

Watching him walk off was very nearly as absorbing as observing his approach. He walked as all men ought to walk, with a decided swagger to his shoulders.

The road does rarely welcome us, preferring we should stay at home, but I have found the remedy is simply then to move my home itself to other places, and so gain a different view.

Outside, the night was soft and fresh. There was a half-moon shining brightly in a field of stars, a glowing ring of light surrounding it, and it had made a trail across the bay that showed in places through the darker screen of trees.
They walked in silence, and she breathed the mingled scents of wildflowers sleeping in the shadows, and the salt air of the sea.
He had not let go of her hand. She did not want him to. They did not leave the clearing but at length they reached its edge, where rustling branches stretched above them and the light and noise and music of the barn seemed far away. One heart-shaped leaf fell from a nearby tree and landed on his shoulder and unthinkingly she lifted her free hand to brush it off before it marked the white coat she had worked so hard and long to clean.
She felt him looking down at her, and glancing up self-consciously she started to explain. And lost the words.
And then he bent his head and kissed her.
Everything around her seemed to stop, and still, and cease to matter. She could not have said how long it lasted. Not long, probably. It was a gentle kiss but at the same time fierce and sure and full of all the pent-up feelings she herself had fought these past months, and now she knew he had felt them just as she had, and had fought them, too. It was a great release to give up fighting. Give up everything, and float in the sensation.

Better to find out certain things by living them, not by reading them in a book.

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.

I'd never met a redhead yet who didn't have the same allure - a sort of blend of vibrant energy and freshness that made those of us with brown hair feel ridiculously dull.

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

Because it is in giving of ourselves and our possessions that we best please God; by actions, not words. And all men do deserve a chance to earn God's grace.

After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.

You couldn't have picked a better time," I assured him warmly. "It'll do wonders for my image. By teatime it'll be all over town that I'm related to a vicar." "Or that you're having an affair with one." Tom grinned. "Village people have terribly suspicious minds, you know.

Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.

The columbine and iris bowed down to make way for bolder sprays of red valerian, and a mingled profusion of clustered Canterbury bells and sweet william, pale blues and pinks intertwined, danced at the feet of more stately spears of deep-purple foxglove and monkshood.

I will see you free of Jabez Howard before this week is out," he told me, touching my cheek again with that disturbingly gentle touch. "Do not smile at me, so - I mean to do it, and I shall. Or do you find the prospect of marrying me so amusing?" The smile died on my lips. "You cannot marry me." "Oh, can I not?" He grinned boldly. "I have a reputation, my love, for doing the impossible. In one week's time I warrant you'll not doubt my word.

I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada - but by the time I'd left high school, I'd moved seven times with my family, my father's engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea.

It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?

I don't know
is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder? Or is it something handed out to some, and not to others?"
"A bit of both, I should think."
" ... I'm not so sure ... I think we all make choices in our lives that set us down the road to happiness or disappointment. It's just that we can't always see where the road is leading us until we're halfway there.

Of course," Armand was saying to Simon, "you know that it was an American, like yourself, who nearly ruined the wine-making in France?" "We're Canadians." "But that is the same thing, surely?

How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.

Take you my ring," he repeated, "and keep it with you." His tone was stubborn, and so I obeyed, sliding the great ring from his outstretched finger. The ring was cold, as his hands were cold, and I held it tenderly in my palm, blinking back the rising wetness of my eyes. "Remember that hawk, Mariana Farr," he told me gently, "and seek me not with your eyes, but with your soul. The soul sees what truly matters.

Always he's looking for something, he's chasing it. Always the neighbour's grass is greener, somewhere else, over the next hill." Her smile was slight. "My grass is green enough.

The face is a plain one," said Hugh, "but the workings inside will not fail ye.

When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down, Creep home and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there You loved when all was young.

Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.

But till then, I could wait – I was in no great hurry. Like the swans, I had mated for life.

The secret to keeping one's actions concealed from the enemy is, in most cases, to learn what he thinks you will do, and then seem to be doing it, for that is what he'll believe

She nodded, looking down at the small wooden bird, a plain thing carved by a great man who'd always taken pleasure in creating things with his own hands. She's telling me, I think, that I should seek to be none other than myself, and so fly always like the bird that I was born to be.

Whatever time we have," he said, "it will be time enough.

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.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

Who's Richard?" he asked me calmly. "What?" "You called me Richard just now." My smile was not quite natural. "Did I? I can't imagine why. Sorry." "Old flame, is he?" He clung to it, persistent. "Something like that." I nodded, trying to turn it into a joke. "Why, are you jealous?" Instead of smiling back, as I had expected, he kept his eyes hard on my face for a long moment before answering. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. After another moment the smile came, the one I had been waiting to see. "Come on," he invited, turning his horse towards the tall chimneys of Crofton Hall, "I'll race you back to the stables.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.

David McClelland was changed by that day more than most men.

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.

Tis the curse of a woman of influence that she must always be reckoned unvirtuous.

clearing and into the

It's the only thing I begrudge the rich," I said, as I followed him back down the damp-smelling staircase to the ground floor.
"What's that?"
"Their ability to buy books that the rest of us can never hope to own.

There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment.

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.

Rob was always a gentleman.

Well." Vivien smiled, swinging her legs. "At least when Iain starts yelling, his accent gets thicker, so you usually can't understand a word he's ... No, don't pull that one," she stopped me suddenly. "That one I do recognize. It's some sort of a daisy, or something.

Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before.

I've told you once I would not force you to my will ... When we become lovers, it will be because you desire as much as I
-Richard

Any man deserving of your notice will need nothing to impress him but that you should be yourself, and any man deserving of your love will see you as you truly are, and love you notwithstanding.

hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever

I don't much like crowds. You ought to count yourself lucky - when I took Vivien round to show her the restored rooms a couple of years ago, we had to hide in a cupboard for twenty minutes." Lucky Vivien, I almost said, but I caught myself in time. Instead I asked him, tongue in cheek, "There's a name for that, isn't there? A pathological fear of crowds?" He nodded. "Privacy.

I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn't been changed since the 19th century.

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.

I'd always been puzzled when books about people with Asperger's claimed that we didn't have empathy. True, I might have trouble sometimes guessing how another person felt, but sadness was an obvious emotion and an easy one to spot most of the time. My problem wasn't that I didn't understand their feelings, only that I didn't have a clue how to respond to them. I never knew the proper thing to do or say. I wasn't good at comforting. He

The sky was wide and inviting, and the grass was cool and sweetly refreshing under my bare feet as I walked across the undulating field towards the river. It was a short walk, only a mile or so, but I did not hurry it, letting my soul soak up the glorious sensation of freedom and lightness.

Tis action moves the world ... [in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.

Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.

Don't talk foolish," I said. His voice was coming from very far away, and it frightened me. "'Tis only talk," he assured me, grinning. "And I'd think it unlikely that the priests would welcome a heathen like myself into their number. Besides, my ghost will be busy enough, watching over you." "Do you mean to haunt me, then?" "Ay." His eyes were very warm on mine. "You'll not be rid of me so easily.

And what was the second reason?" I asked him. "The what?" "Your second reason for dropping by to see me," I prompted, and his face cleared. "Oh. I wanted to ask if you would make me a cup of coffee." He smiled happily. "Iain's Scotch is terribly strong, you know, and he's generous in the pouring of it, and I was far too proud to tell him when I'd had enough. He has a habit of reminding me how Englishmen can't hold their liquor. But I don't think I'd be able to walk home right now," he confessed, "without falling into a ditch along the way.

D'you think I'd let a little thing like the grave come between us?
-Richard

When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them, he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.

My kingdom for a camera," he said, his gray eyes crinkling in amusement. "You ought to see your face." I closed my gaping mouth and shook my head, amazed. "How on earth did you know I was there?" I asked him. Iain braced both fists in the small of his back and stretched. "I'm no clairvoyant," he assured me. "I saw you hopping the fence. Thought you were taking a devil of a time getting here. Besides," he added, pointing at the clear outline of our shadows on the shed wall, "if you've a mind to sneak up on a Scotsman, you'd best do it when the sun's not at your back.

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

Tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories.

Children teach you worries that you never knew you had,

To sail beyond the sunset ... I'd thought that beautiful, once. But now I knew it was a wasted effort, chasing sunsets. There was nothing on the other side.

Edmund had obviously never yet experienced the speed with which news traveled round the docklands. "Is there anyone who does not know him?" "All

1. "Mistress Jamieson" tells Mary when they meet: "My mother likes to say some people choose the path of danger on their own, for it is how the Lord did make them, and they never will be changed." Do you agree? Was it more true in the past than today? Did Mary purposely choose a path of danger? Who else? 2. The author has people in her own life with Asperger's syndrome who helped her with Sara's character. What was it like to be in the point of view of a person with Asperger's syndrome? Did you have any preconceived ideas about Asperger's? Did they change? 3. Journeys (physical and otherwise) are a prevalent theme in many of Susanna Kearsley's books. What journeys can you identify in this book, past and present? How do they differ for female and male characters? 4. Mary takes "Mistress Jamieson" as a role model. "She

So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place," she said. "I cannot leave.

Mary could have told him that it was no use, that she had called her father back and it had made no difference, that if something once desired to leave you it was lost already and forever.

Was there another Celia Sands?

If it is true that men have souls that do survive them," he went on, ignoring me, "and if those souls are born again to life, you need not worry that my ghost will haunt you. I'll haunt you in the flesh, instead.

...a man with eyes the color of the winter sea.

My pleasure," he assured me, propping one shoulder against the doorjamb and folding his arms across his chest. "Rather nice change from my normal daily routine. I don't often have comely young maidens throwing themselves at my feet."
"Yes, well," I said, coloring, "that won't happen again."
He smiled down at me, and after a final handshake I made my departure. I had almost reached the end of the neatly edged walk when he spoke.
"What a pity," he said, but I don't think I was meant to hear it.

My mother, come to think of it, would have been a welcome sight jut now ... "There are no such things as ghosts," she would have told me, and of course I would have believed her

And how is dear Patrick the Protester? What's he on about this week? Saving the dormice? Blocking the bypass?" "Battling the logging industry, actually. Chaining himself to trees. But only at the weekend," I explained. "He doesn't have so much free time, now he's married." "Ah.

Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms - the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.

It winna dee ye ony good, it disna ring. The salt fae the sea ruins the wiring, fast as I fix it. Besides,' said the man, as he came up to join us, 'I'm nae in the hoose tae be hearin ye, am I?

Because everything does make sense, when you look at it from the right angle. All you have to do is find out what that angle is, for whatever it is you want to understand, and bang, the universe becomes a rational place.

He brought the horse closer, reining in sharply so his muscled thigh was scarcely a handsbreadth from my face, knowing that the heavy log at my heels prevented any retreat. "I've told you once I would not force you to my will," he reminded me, drawing one finger along my upturned jawline. "When we become lovers, it will be because you desire it as much as I." His finger brushed my lips, the fleeting phantom of a kiss, before he raised his hand to his hat and bid me a polite good day.

There was no DVR, no Netflix, and no binge-watching. We didn't even have a VCR till I was nearly out of high school.

Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.

Could become like that, I thought suddenly. If I did not guard against it, I too could become like the doomed birds in the dovecote. Like lovely, dead-eyed Caroline, with her hair turning white from worry at twenty-five. For if the dovecote was a trap, then so was Greywethers, and my uncle's hand held the rope that could pull shut the door and bar my flight.

The world becomes a wider place, with but a little learning.

He told me once that the devil dwells in you." "No doubt he does believe it. And what do you think, Mariana Farr?" He did look faintly devilish, smiling down at me with his dark clothes and his dark hair and those glinting eyes the color of the forest that surrounded us, shutting us off together from the wider world. I studied him closely, and shrugged in my turn. "I am no simple chit in hanging sleeves, my lord. I have eyes of my own to judge with, and I see no horns.