Mary Balogh Quotes - Page 2

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
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
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
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.
Mary Balogh
But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love.
Mary Balogh
Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.
Mary Balogh
People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it.
Mary Balogh
All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?
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
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.
Mary Balogh
His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.
Mary Balogh
But marriage is forever.''Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you.
Mary Balogh
Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.
Mary Balogh
One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest.
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
The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.
Mary Balogh
Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift. He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic. He was not, though.He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business. For receiving meant opening up the heart again.Perhaps to rejection.Or disillusionment.Or pain.Or even heart break.It was all terribly risky.And all terribly necessary.And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...
Mary Balogh
Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?
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
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 ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?
Mary Balogh
I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
Mary Balogh
It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself.
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
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
Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.
Mary Balogh
The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.
Mary Balogh
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.
Mary Balogh
You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.
Mary Balogh
You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.
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
Life is a precious possession...It is what one makes of it. - Charity Duncan
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
It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember.He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that he came to think about it, he must have it set right one of these days.Why should a clock be forced to go throught its entire existence four minutes behind the rest of the world? It was not logical.The trouble was though, that if the clock were suddenly right, he would be forever confused and arriving four minutes early -- or did he mena late? -- for meals and various other appointments. That would agitate his servants and cause consternation in the kitchen.It was probably better to leave the clock as it was.
Mary Balogh
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.
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
She was not sorry. And if it was the wine telling her that, then she would tell the wine the same thing tomorrow. She was not sorry.
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
Why do I want to run from happiness?
Mary Balogh
There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.
Mary Balogh
My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.
Mary Balogh