Quotes from Mary Balogh

Miss Manford's hands flapped ineffectually while she chanted, 'Bless my soul!' to a God who would have been deafened had he been foolish enough to listen.

There is something about boys," she said, "that makes them think it is unmanly to show any feelings other than scorn and irritation or any enthusiasm for anything. It is a very unattractive trait.

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.

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.

I believe tnat life is very generous with us once we have shown the will to take a positive course. It is ery ready to keep on opening doors for us. It is just that sometimes we lose our willpower and courage adn prefer to stay on the familiar, safe side of each door.

Home had always been a place to dream of.

Little people are often more fierce than their larger counterparts[...]

Ah, but we are women as well as teachers... We have needs that nature has given us fr the very preservation of our species

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

The best way to cope with pain was to pass it on to someone else.

The future would take care of itself.

When you read this, I shall be gone. I shall not tell you where I am going, because I do not intend ever to return.

She was not even sure herself why she had wept. It just seemed to her in a moment of painful clarity that she had never learned how to cope with life and that she had dragged her children into her own helpless darkness. And so the cycle would be perpetuated. . . .

Their love had developed out of friendship; friendship helped it deepen.

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

I would be more inclined to tell my children the opposite," she said. "Stop being 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.

We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts when it has nothing to do with them.

I want you, my dear. I do believe I have fallen in love with you. What a nasty ailment that may prove to be! I have not suffered from it before. Is it deadly, do you suppose? Is it a terminal illness?

The silence extended between them. A silence that was gradually filled with unspoken words, almost as if their minds connected though they did not speak.

I can't, she whispered. I am so afraid, Robert. I am afraid to love again. I know, he said, but I am afraid not to. Look ahead, Elizabeth. Ten years. Twenty years. Thirty. Can you bear to think of the emptiness? I cannot. I need you and I believe you need me just as much. Come back to me, love. Please.

Viscount Darleigh was charming as well as handsome, and he had the uncanny ability to look in the direction of the person who was speaking almost as if he could see that person. He moved about with the aid of a cane but with surprising confidence. It was clear that he had learned how to cope with his blindness at least within the confines of his own home.

What a dreadful fate it was sometimes to be a woman. To be dependent. To have to sit and wait. To be helpless to order one's own life no matter how carefully and sensibly one tried to plan.

Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.

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.