Mary Balogh Quotes

It is just a pity," he added, "that some things can never be entirely forgotten just by trying. But we have all learned that lesson. ~ Mary Balogh

You will find that wanting, even loving, is not enough. ~ Mary Balogh

Well,' Frederick had said, 'I will see what can be arranged, Archie. But I will not have the girl frightened or compromised.'
'You sound like a grandfather who has raised fifteen daughters and is now starting on his granddaughters, Freddie,' Lord Archibald had said. 'It is most disconcerting. ~ Mary Balogh

played any sort of game. Ten. ~ Mary Balogh

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

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

I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time. ~ Mary Balogh

We all learn to bury a broken heart beneath layers of dignity ~ Mary Balogh

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... ~ Mary Balogh

She had held her life to an even keel by killing all deep feeling, by living upon the surface of life. ~ Mary Balogh

Dreams are wishes that will in all probability never come true. (Sophie) ~ Mary Balogh

Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love? ~ Mary Balogh

One cannot live from one day into the next without changing. It is the nature of life. Small choices are always necessary even when large ones do not loom. I will change what I choose to change and retain what I choose to retain. I will even listen to advice since it is foolish not to, provided the adviser has something of value to say. But I will not choose between Anna and Lady Anastasia, for I am both. I merely have to decide, one choice at a time, how I will somehow reconcile the two without rejecting either. ~ Mary Balogh

If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle. ~ Mary Balogh

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

But I was a dreamer, you see, not a weakling. ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Rapists do not deserve to live." And ~ Mary Balogh

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) ~ Mary Balogh

I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise. ~ Mary Balogh

Why was it that silence sometimes felt like a physical thing with a weight of its own? ~ Mary Balogh

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

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? ~ Mary Balogh

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant. ~ Mary Balogh

more annoying than her general righteousness. But Camille ~ Mary Balogh

You are my own. You are my own. He had not meant the words in that way. He had been talking strictly about possession. But oh, the longing for his love was an unbearably painful ache in her. ~ Mary Balogh

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

there was many a slip twixt cup and lip. ~ Mary Balogh

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

It's this idea that success changes you as a person ... I've never seen my career that way. ~ Mary Balogh

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 ... ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

But I am glad you are not some sort of superhuman pillar of strength. I would not be able to prevail against it. I am too weak, too fragile. In each other's weaknesses, perhaps we can both find strength. ~ Mary Balogh

My woman. She had a momentary image of a caveman, hanging on to his woman by the hair with one hand while in the other he wielded a club to beat back caveman number two. Perhaps she would sketch it one day. ~ Mary Balogh

And he knew at that moment that love world never die, that it would never fade away altogether. The time might come when he would meet and marry someone else. He might even be reasonably happy. But there would always be a deep precious place in his heart that belonged to his first real love. ~ Mary Balogh

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

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

Ladies did not allow fear to master them. Ladies did not abjure society merely because they were embarrassed and unhappy, merely because they felt unattractive and unwanted. Ladies did not give in to self-pity. ~ Mary Balogh

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

Living in a house with a large library," she said, "is a little like living in heaven ~ Mary Balogh

Every...woman," the old lady said, "loves a ...rogue. ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

He wished he understood women better. It was a well-known fact that they did not mean half of what they said.
But which half did they mean? ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

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

It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part. ~ Mary Balogh

And so silence and ... darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly.
"Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything. ~ Mary Balogh

Unguarded moment she pictured herself waltzing with Viscount Whitleaf, ~ Mary Balogh

Gifts were dangerous things, she thought. Sometimes one succeeded only in taking far more than one gave. ~ Mary Balogh

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

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong. ~ Mary Balogh

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 ~ Mary Balogh

They were stranded on the opposite sides of death, at least for now, and that was all there was to it. ~ Mary Balogh

One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up. ~ Mary Balogh

Do you believe that sometimes life points out a way for us to follow even if it does not force us into taking that particular path? ~ Mary Balogh

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? ~ Mary Balogh

Have you noticed," she asked him, "how standing still can sometimes be no different from moving backward? For the whole world moves on and leaves one behind. ~ Mary Balogh

How dare he give her no opportunity to ignore him? ~ Mary Balogh

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 ... ~ Mary Balogh

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell? ~ Mary Balogh

The ladies perhaps had the advantage in the sheer size of ~ Mary Balogh

Unfortunately, Sir Gerald, people rarely get what they deserve in this life. Perhaps that is why we have had to invent a heaven. - Miss Blythe, A Precious Jewel ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude. ~ Mary Balogh

When we last out at ourselves for having lost control, we are reminded that we never can be in total control, that all life asks of us is to do our best to cope with what is handed to us. ~ Mary Balogh

I Know what you meant when you told me she was full of love and brimming over with it. And so innocent that one fears for her. Perhaps we ought not to fear for such people but for ourselves whose experience has taught us not to trust one another or life itself. ~ Mary Balogh

It is a dreary world out there. It makes one thankful after all to be indoors with a fire burning in the hearth. ~ Mary Balogh

But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope. ~ Mary Balogh

Do you have anyone in mind, Hugo?" the duke asked. "Not really." Hugo sighed. "I have an army of female cousins and aunts who would be only too ~ Mary Balogh

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

Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain-of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it. ~ Mary Balogh

Miss Blanche Heyward, opera dancer, would have made a superlative drill sergeant if she had just been a man. ~ Mary Balogh

And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. He disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy.
He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it.
He was not amused.
Or in any way pleased. ~ Mary Balogh

One could not live forever, though, upon memories and dreams. One could not forever ignore the fact that one was alone and that perhaps one would be alone for the rest of one's life. ~ Mary Balogh

He loved me," she said, her voice leaden. "It is so easy to take love for granted when one has always had it. I knew he loved me as I loved him, but I did not realize perhaps how much until all love was removed. ~ Mary Balogh

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

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives. ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Would she be able to bear never seeing him again? Never in this life? ~ Mary Balogh

But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams. ~ Mary Balogh

Had she read any good books lately? At all? She could tell him that she was going to take out a subscription at the library tomorrow because she was feeling starved of good reading material and could he recommend anything that she might not already have read? ~ Mary Balogh

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? ~ Mary Balogh

Home had always been a place to dream of. ~ Mary Balogh

Ah, this feels just like the old times ... I still miss you and the others, you know, and life at school and those times when two or more of us would sit up talking far too late into the night. Which is not to say I would give up my present life to return there, but ... Well, even happy choices involve some sacrifice. And most of us, I suppose, would like to both have our cake and eat it if only it were possible ~ Mary Balogh

(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. ~ Mary Balogh

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

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. ~ Mary Balogh

Suffering can kill. Not always physically. But it can kill dreams and it can deaden hope and the will to live. ~ Mary Balogh

Tell me, Lady Angeline, is there a color not represented in your rather splendid riding hat? It would be a shame if there were. It would be sitting all alone on a palette somewhere, feeling rejected and dejected. ~ Mary Balogh

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

She wondered if she would have tumbled into love with him during the past week if her heart had been whole, if her soul had no been shattered long ago. She rather thought she might have. But a heart and soul could not be mended by the power of the will, she had discovered over seven years. And so she had accepted reality and moved on. ~ Mary Balogh

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. ~ Mary Balogh

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

Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway? ~ Mary Balogh

We often do not say what is in our hearts," he said, "to those who are closest and most dear to us. ~ Mary Balogh

By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting - a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had
had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist - even, perhaps, a murderer - could not take away from her. ~ Mary Balogh

Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved. And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals - the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her. Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness. He ~ Mary Balogh