Mary Balogh Quotes

Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.
Mary Balogh
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
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
Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?
Mary Balogh
Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?
Mary Balogh
My mind cannot grasp forever," she told him. "There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end?
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
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.
Mary Balogh
And I need you, my love," he said. "I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that—Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you.""To look after Augusta?" she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. "To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?""Yes," he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet."And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover.
Mary Balogh
Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.
Mary Balogh
After a few awkward moments, Lizzy joined them and they skipped along the avenue, the three of them, laughing and whooping and altogether making an undignified spectacle of themselves.
Mary Balogh
I am still not used to being the possessor of such a grand title. I believe I shall have to start wearing a purple satin turban and carrying a lorgnette.
Mary Balogh
Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?
Mary Balogh
Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability.
Mary Balogh
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.
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
Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.
Mary Balogh
There is something infinitely better than happily-ever-after. There is happiness. Happiness is a living, dynamic thing, Eve, and has to be worked on every moment for the rest of our lives. It is a far more exciting prospect than that silly static idea of a happily-ever-after. Would you not agree?" - Aidan Bedwyn
Mary Balogh
If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.
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
Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.
Mary Balogh
Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.
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
It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.
Mary Balogh
I do not admire greatness that has no substance.
Mary Balogh
He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done.
Mary Balogh
And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive.
Mary Balogh
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
Mary Balogh
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Mary Balogh
She had made reason and common sense her gods. She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she unstood to be her mentors.
Mary Balogh
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?
Mary Balogh
She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it.
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
Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.
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
I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.
Mary Balogh
Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?
Mary Balogh
It is stronge how smells can bring back vivid memories.
Mary Balogh
We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.
Mary Balogh
She had never believed in fate. She still did not. It would be nonsense of freedom of will and choice, and it was through such freedom that we worked our way through life and learned what we needed to learn. But sometimes, it seemed to her, there was something, some sign, to nudge one along in a certain direction. What one chose to do with that nudge was up to that person.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
Mary Balogh
There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.
Mary Balogh
The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.
Mary Balogh
I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.
Mary Balogh
Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for.
Mary Balogh
But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?
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
Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.
Mary Balogh
One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.
Mary Balogh
He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a placeto be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again toleave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.Very much on the verge of tears.And very frightened.
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
Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh