Quotes from Mary Balogh

Por qué todo lo maravilloso tiene que quedar atrás?, pensó. ¿Por qué tenía que haber tantos adioses en la vida?

He had to force himself not to pull her into his arms to comfort her. Damn it, he had hurt her when he had meant only to tease. And he was uncomfortable with feelings of compassion.

If she were not very careful, she would fall in love with him. And would not that be a shocking thing?

She had never suspected . . . that there could be such passion, such intense and shattering joy.

Sometimes one's prejudices and preconceptions were more enjoyable to cling to than inconvenient facts that pointed in a different direction.

He rode away from her with the deepest regret.

The previous years had been dull and lonely ones. It was pleasing to know that one was admired, especially when the admirer was a handsome and personable man.

She amuses you? she repeated. And that is reason for marriage? An excellent one, he agreed. I believe I shall not know a moment's dullness with Henry.

Ah, something about young love, I believe. There is no stopping it, apparently.

She was suddenly plagued by a thoroughly novel desire to rush across to where he still sat in his chair, and cradle his head against her breast. She had never seen him vulnerable, had never even dreamed that he had any weakness.

But she had been too wrapped up with painful memory, uncomfortable reality.

He hovered at the edge of a kiss, just as a few nights before he had hovered . . .

She felt that he could become a very close friend. And to a lonely person, friendship can seem a likely substitute for love.

And so he had lost her before he had ever had a chance of having her. And had determinedly, over the next several years, pushed the pain and the longing into the background of his mind, forced friendship to the fore, and won his battle.

But they are good hands," he said, holding them up in the space between them, palms toward her. Slim hands, slender fingers, gold rings on four of them. Three of those fingertips had felled a man and left him gasping for survival. "They will protect you all the rest of my life and never hurt you. They will hold you and bring you comfort when you need it. They will hold our children. They will caress you and bring you pleasure. Come. Lie down on the bed." Our

I could not crave any other woman when there was you.

He wanted to be himself again. Except that there was no being himself ever again.

She had known that he could be cruel, that he was basically heartless, but she had never had face-to-face proof of the fact before. The voice and the facial expression that she had witnessed during that walk . . . had made him a stranger to her. She had never seen him cold, sneering, sarcastic before. He had behaved as if he hated her. But why? She was the one who had been wronged, hurt almost beyond bearing six years before. Was it conscience that had made him turn upon her with such contempt?

Even at the age of eighteen, he thought suddenly, she had been an expert in the wearing of masks. One would never have known that the sunny-natured girl had grown up in such a home.

She did not want to think of him as a man who was perhaps essentially lonely.

un destino que dispone un patrón para la vida de cada uno y nos da opciones, numerosas opciones, mediante las cuales encontrar nuestro patrón y ser feliz.

To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations.

The price of love, she thought, was pain. Was it worth it? Was it better not to love at all?

Oh the ironies of life . . . They would be funny if they were not so very tragic.