Quotes from Mary Balogh

One does not simply read books... one climbs inside them and lives there.

It was strange how the heart clung to hope even when there was no reasonable basis for it, Morgan found. And how life went on.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

Sometimes, he said, it is necessary to go back before we can move forward.

But the things is, you see, that two people can never actually become one no matter how close they are. And it would not be desirable even if it were possible. What would happen when one of them died? It would leave the other as a half a person, and that would be a dreadful thing. We must each be a whole person and therefore we each need some privacy to be alone with ourselves and our own feelings.

Have you noticed, she asked him, how standing still can sometimes be no different from moving backward? For the whole world moves on and leaves one behind.

Every...woman, the old lady said, loves a ...rogue.

He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a place to be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again to leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears. Very much on the verge of tears. And very frightened.

I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing.

We can always do anything as long as we are alive. We can always change, grow, evolve into a far better version of ourselves. It is surely what life is for.

When one had once suffered a great hurt, there was always a weakness afterward, a vulnerability where there had been wholeness and strength before - and innocence.

No time is really wasted unless one never learns the lessons that it offers.

It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.

Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.

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?

The trouble with running away is that you must always take yourself with you.

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.

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?

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.

Tonight he would do anything in the world for her. Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.

We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.

Why is it, she asked, snuggling closer, that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?