Quotes from Mary Balogh

Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo. It just simply was.

Sometimes it just seems that love is not enough, does it?

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

I'm terrified that I will never be able to put him from my mind. I don't love him but I'm afraid that he will make it impossible for me ever to love anyone else.

Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is.

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!

Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world.

Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.

There is no such thing as time. There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.

One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.

She was not sorry. And if it was the wine telling her that, then she would tell the wine the same thing tomorrow. She was not sorry.

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.

And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn," he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. "And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.

Love does not last forever, then?" "He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.

The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.

Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?

I'm terrified that I will never be able to put him from my mind. I don't love him but I'm afraid that he will make it impossible for me ever to love anyone else.

And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. He disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy. He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it. He was not amused. Or in any way pleased.

Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being. No one was shallow. Not really.

Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.

There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.

I would be consumed by you,' she said, and blinked her eyes furiously when she felt them fill with tears. 'You would sap all the energy and all the joy from me. You would put out all the fire of my vitality.' 'Give me a chance to fan the flames of that fire,' he said, 'and to nurture your joy.