Quotes from Mary Balogh

Despair, he remembered now from an earlier occasion, could hurt as keenly as an open knife wound.

Everything about my life was a lie and remained so until after his death. What I set as my primary goal in life was all a mirage in a vast, empty desert.

I wish you would tell me, if I may help you.

I know that I am in no position to ask a favor of you. But I beg you to do one thing, not for me—I shall never ask anything more of you for myself.

She had hardly slept the night before and even yet was not quite able to think coherently enough to sort out what exactly had happened or how she felt about it. Too much had happened, too many strange and unexpected things.

Will it be the same? she asked. Will the magic be gone, Robert? I am afraid to go back.

My life came to an end the day I left you, he whispered fiercely. I have lived in hell since then. I do not need to die, Becky. Nothing could be worse than what I have lived. If you wished to see me punished, know that your wish has been granted a thousandfold.

He must not know that this separation would be more painful to her than it would be to him.

What if I should drop the ring? Cyril asked on the way to the church. Surely one of the functions of the best man - the principal function, in fact - was the calm the nerves of the bridegroom. Then you crawl around on the floor until you recover it, Percy said. It will not happen. I have never done this before, Cyril added. Neither have I, Percy told him.

She wanted this to happen, had wanted it from that first moment of meeting him on the laneway home a couple of weeks before. She wanted him. She loved him. He was Christopher, and she did not care about anything else. She did not care.

But it was not just his kisses that she missed. There was something else about the man that exhilarated her, something that appealed to a kindred spirit in her. Mr. Seyton was a man with a goal in life, and he was willing to work toward that goal even at the expense of his own safety. There was a spirit of adventure in him. Kate found herself envying him greatly. If only there could be more adventure in her life! She would burst soon at the boredom of her present existence.

Her heart ached on.

physical, mental, and financial collapse had had its roots in years of weakness and self-indulgence. Near financial ruin rarely came overnight.

He was fabulously wealthy, he was astonishingly handsome, and he held one of the highest ranks in the country.

Ah, what we do to destroy ourselves, Philippa thought. Yet so many of us do it.

A friendship that was agony to continue but that would be a living death to lose.

The passion in his face might have been love, might have been hate, might have been both.

Some things always remain the same. We are not the same people we were six years ago. We will have to get to know each other again. But our love has survived, has it not? Can we not give it a chance again, Elizabeth? You do love me, do you not? Yes, she admitted hesitantly against his coat, I always have. Well, he said, chuckling against her hair. You have sealed your doom now, love. You cannot expect me ever to let you go after you have admitted that, you know.

And yet he had taken her to that inn wanting to soothe himself with feminine compassion and warmth. Her very silence and self-possession had inflamed him, angered him. He had wanted her to reach out to him as no one had reached out for more years than he could recall, and she had looked at him with steady acceptance of what she must do to earn her living. He cursed softly and turned from the

She would, in fact, make a quite deplorable duchess.

When she had been in his arms, his mouth on hers, she had surrendered completely to a physical longing that should have died years before. She had wanted him and given in to that desire. She had loved him.

I think it is possible to start again, don't you? Life, I mean. It cannot possibly be intended that we simply acquire experience upon experience like a lot of excess baggage to carry about with us until we stagger into middle age and old age beneath the impossible weight of it all. We must, as we grow older and wiser, be able to allow all the... all the pain to seep out of our bones and souls so that we can start again.

She was achingly conscious, as he escorted her as usual to the door of her room, that this was the last time she would be with him like this.

It was dread. A dread of going back into that other, long-dead life—or what he had thought was long-dead.