Quotes from Mary Balogh

Tonight seems eons away, but there are these moments.

I am in awe," he said. "Where do all these ideas come from?" "I think from a lifetime of only being able to observe and never being able to do," she said. "I have twenty years of inaction to make up for.

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.

They had sparked a note of sympathy in each other. They had found it easy to talk about their deepest feelings and dreams.

I can see why men do not take up knitting and such. They would never be able to pluck up the courage to go and get what they needed.

If living were the right word. It had been a suspended life. She had worn black for Teddy inside and out. And somehow it had become a comfortable way of life. While part of her yearned for gaiety and a renewal of life, the other part clung to its cocoon. It was safer to remain inside it. It was less likely that she would have to experience again the pain of losing someone around whom her life had come to revolve.

This is your home,' he said. 'You are mistress of Finchley Park, Vanessa. You may do whatever you wish.' Her smile broadened. 'Within reason,' he added hastily.

She would spend the rest of her life wondering about him . . . She would wonder if he ever thought of her . . .

Are you afraid of a healthy argument? Or is it that you are so convinced that you are right that my opinion is of no interest to you?

When they tell me things I wish to hear, I invariably believe them.

You offer emptiness and heartache and an endless search for pleasure with which to fill the emptiness.

She fled up the stairs to her room. But her room did not provide sanctuary enough. She needed to be quite alone. She needed to be somewhere where she could recollect herself and find some peace.

She did not want it. She did not want all this again. How she wished he had not come.

How fragile were the moments of chance on which the whole course of one's life hinged.

I suppose," he said, his voice harsher than he had intended it to be, "you want marriage again." "No," she said quickly. "No, never that. Not again. Why would any woman willingly make herself the property of a man and suffer all the humiliation of submerging her character and her very identity in his?

She laughed rather self-consciously. I have never talked about this with anyone before, she said. He hunched his shoulder so that her head slipped against it. People so rarely talk about anything that matters, he said. We fill silences and so often live with a deeper silence and a greater loneliness.

He was being the scrupulously honorable gentleman, she realized, protecting her name, taking the consequences of his own indiscretion. She understood all that and was grateful for it. And resentful of it. How helpless women were. The pawns of men. To be tripped up and pitched headlong into the dirt by men, and then to be picked up by them and dusted off and restored to uprightness. But that was the way of the world.

She saved herself from endless heartache. . . . She probably spent a cold and lonely old age wishing she had a little pleasure to look back upon . . . Prim virtue can be a cold bedfellow.

The only thing over which we have any control whatsoever is the very next decision we make.

It is just that . . . I think you are worth knowing, though I cannot be sure.

He had been raised, after all, to stand alone and always to do what he believed to be right.

Some instinct told her that this was usually done in darkness and with eyes tightly shut, that usually all the pleasure was hugged tightly to oneself, the pleasure-giver shut out. Even in her inexperience she sensed that lovers did not always love with eyes open and focused on each other's whenever it was feasible to do so.

She could not expect any man to love her that deeply if she did not also understand that he simply was, and that his wasness or isness made him forever the love of her heart. The love of her life.

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?