Quotes from Mary Balogh

And I believe he has suffered in his life. He has a sensitivity to the hurts of others that can have come only from personal experience.

And kissing her and holding her with a desperate tenderness and self-loathing when it was all over again.

In one way . . . living in a cocoon was preferable to stepping out into a larger, brighter, freer world. There was light and joy in this world—she seemed to have lived more intensely in the past week than she had done in all her life before. But there was the anticipation of pain too. The house was going to feel quite unbearably empty . . . . Her life was going to be unbearably empty. But then cocoons were not necessarily warm, comforting places either.

But there was also an inner welling of joy, reflected in the eyes of the man who gazed back at her—it was the first dance of the rest of their lives.

God, he said very quietly. I have never been so terrified in my life. What? Diana frowned . . . I said I am terrified, he said. I think I am in love with you, Diana. I have never felt such a thing before or ever expected to do so. You don't have to say this, she said. I told you I expected nothing beyond tonight. I want a lifetime, he said. I want eternity. Diana, send me away.

He should have stayed away. The memories were going to be very sweet, it was true. They were also going to be unbearable.

This is all a joke to you, is it not? . . . It is not a joke. Your whole future happiness is at stake.

And she gazed upward into the face of all her dreams. Not just Piers' face, though that too. Oh, yes, that too. But the face of her dream. Piers wanting her and loving her. Focused entirely on her. Asking her the question with the one whispered word and with eyes that pleaded and were not quite sure of her answer.

Ah, don't lie to me, he said. Believe me, I want to understand, I want to forgive. When I see you and when I hold you, I cannot believe that you are capable of the villainy that I have accepted all these years. I want you, Elizabeth.

Shall we begin that drive in the park? If we do not leave soon, the exercise will be quite pointless. There will be no one else there to criticize, and no one to admire us.

Already it felt like a dream. Already she felt the painful loneliness of the coming weeks and months—perhaps years.

I do not expect you to understand, Mr. Cunningham. You do not have the experience to understand what has happened to me, just as I do not have the experience to understand what has happened to you in the course of your life. That is where human empathy comes in, he said. If we did not have it and cultivate it, Miss Westcott, we would not understand or sympathize with anyone, for we are all unique in our experience.

It is what we do with the pain, though, how we allow it to shape our character and actions and relationships that matters.

And he was Robert, the man she had always loved, the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she had ever wanted. And wanted now with a searing passion.

Henry was a girl of some intelligence. She recognized a superior intellect and a more powerful will when she met them. It was just that she had never met either until she had deliberately run against the hard wall of Eversleigh's body the night before.

You are a stranger to me, and I am a stranger to myself.

If Piers was much longer, she would throttle him. If he failed altogether to put in an appearance, she would borrow a dueling pistol and shoot him.

It is as well we cannot know when the world will end or when we will die—or when everything that makes the world a beautiful place or life worth living will come crashing down about us.

But it was an ordeal worse than any she had yet experienced in the days since she heard he was coming home. To see him and to hear him was bad enough. To touch him was unendurable—that slim yet surprisingly strong hand that had so often held hers in the past, so often touched and caressed her.

steward, and Matthew Harley chose to be indignant and to take offense at the suggestion that there was something wrong

She had to confess that she had felt out of her depth with the duke. His reactions were not as open and predictable as were those of other people she knew. She had found it impossible to guess what he was thinking.

He had held her close for a full, silent hour, rocking her against him, soothing her numb pain, crying for both her and himself, though she herself had been unable to know the relief of tears.

She could hardly think of a punishment she would enjoy more.

But that was the second version, she reminded him. In the first one you had died and gone to heaven and found it was a brothel..