Quotes from Mary Balogh

She had to get away. She could not stay this close to him and yet this far away from him for much longer.

I cannot now believe that we allowed all those things to happen to us without blazing a trail back to each other. I cannot quite understand why I did not fight my way through hell, though God knows I believed I had done all I could. I was so damned young.

I will treat it as a fantasy. A romantic fantasy. I will make you fall in love with me all over again.

Don't be coy, Suzanne, he said, advancing into the room and moving to her back to reverse the process with the buttons that the maid had begun. Today I need you.

the slightest noise

He knew a lot of facts. But ultimately, as always, he must sketch and paint from intuition and trust that it was more true than all the facts he had amassed. Facts missed a great deal. Facts missed what lay beneath the facts. Facts missed spirit.

Remove your hands from me, my lord, she said calmly. I have nothing to say to you, now or ever. I had never thought to hate anyone. But I believe I do hate you.

Christina. There was nothing else to say. Just her name and all the pain of its utterance.

She did not feel in any mood to playact for a whole evening, but she supposed that she would somehow live through the ordeal.

She wondered how possible it was going to be to start a new life.

She must never allow herself to feel either regret or remorse.

He looked as if he would dearly love to escape, Henry thought as she too stood momentarily alone at the other side of the ballroom.

It was a seductive idea that he might not come until tomorrow after all, but on the whole she hoped he would come today so that this waiting, this suspense, might be at an end.

He had appeared so lighthearted most of the time. And it was his laughter, his teasing, and his smiling eyes that she had fallen in love with six years before.

Hatred, Jeanette had said, was very akin to love. At the moment he felt neither for Christina. He felt only an unwilling pull toward her, a need to know the woman who had haunted him for longer than ten years, to know what those missing years had held for her, to understand why she had made it impossible for him to ever marry anyone else, to understand why he both dreaded and hoped that his seed, inside her now, had impregnated her and bound them together for life.

No, he decided . . . he surely could not have believed for one single moment that it really was all finished between them.

This is the man who loves you, darling, who has loved you for six long and lonely years. Open your eyes and look at me, love.

And so he drifted back to London... where he lived a life of increasingly busy idleness as he searched out one diversion after another

For life would lose its final light if that friendship were ever withdrawn.

And after he was gone, there would be memories to live on. But she would not think of that yet.

It is all over now, love, he said, a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. We do not have to part ever again. I can take you home with me.

That would seem to imply that women crave brutality and abuse," she said. "It does not show a great respect for either women themselves or their minds.

I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it!

Everyone writes differently. I hope to get people energized so they'll want to rush home to write.