Quotes from Mary Balogh

Tell me, Lady Angeline, is there a color not represented in your rather splendid riding hat? It would be a shame if there were. It would be sitting all alone on a palette somewhere, feeling rejected and dejected.

One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?, she said, I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up.

I am afraid that it will all be ruined. It is like stepping out into the darkness when one has a world of light and warmth behind one.

It takes chracter to refuse a man you love more dearly than life merely because marrying him would be the wrong thing to do.

Ah, those eyes, he said. They can speak volumes, but sometimes even I cannot translate the language. And we never did invent enough signs for deeper thoughts and feelings.

Perhaps we should do the learning - and learn not to communicate, or to do it in a different way. Now there is a thought. Perhaps we could learn your peace if we could share your silence.

Sou todas as pessoas que já fui - esclareceu - e todas as experiências que vivi. Não tenho de fazer opções. Não tenho de renegar uma identidade para poder reclamar outra. Sou quem sou. In Uma noite de amor

Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity? How could she have felt like that without love? Was love essential? Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life? If it did, it was too late now for her to find it. Must she make do with this instead, then? Only this? Pleasure without love?

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?

Life so often becomes a determined, relentless avoidance of pain - of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain has to be acknowledged and even touched so that one can move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.

That is the excitement of life, he said when he was finished. The not knowing. It is often best not to know.

You are my own. You are my own. He had not meant the words in that way. He had been talking strictly about possession. But oh, the longing for his love was an unbearably painful ache in her.

Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October - though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever?

She wondered if she would have tumbled into love with him during the past week if her heart had been whole, if her soul had no been shattered long ago. She rather thought she might have. But a heart and soul could not be mended by the power of the will, she had discovered over seven years. And so she had accepted reality and moved on.

But Ashley had always understood. He had always known there was a person behind the silence - not just a person who listened with her eyes and would have responded in similar words if she could have, but one who inhabited a world of her own and lived in it quiet as richly as anyone in his world. With Ashley there had always been a language. There had always been a way of giving him glimpses of herself.

That was the heart of the difference, she thought. In her world she had learned to be . Other people seemed to gain their sense of identity and worth from doing.

One could not live forever, though, upon memories and dreams. One could not forever ignore the fact that one was alone and that perhaps one would be alone for the rest of one's life.

Negativity could be frighteningly contagious.

Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.

It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.

The wind was cold and cut into her even though it was at her back, but she loved the wild sound and the salt smell of it and the deepened sense of solitude it brought.

She looked like someone he must have known all his life. She looked like a little piece of home - whatever the devil his mind meant by presenting him with that odd idea.

They were stranded on the opposite sides of death, at least for now, and that was all there was to it.