Quotes from Mary Balogh

Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness.

The only thing you can neither plan nor control, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, is love itself. When you find it, you must yield to it. But only if it is the one and only true passion of your life. Never if it is anything less than that, or life will consume you. But how am I to know? She had asked him. You will know.

The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?

There is a l-life lesson here for all of us, is there, M-Mrs. Keeping?" he asked her. "We should all and always look upward, and all our t-troubles will be at an end?" She smiled. "If only life were that simple." "But for daffodils it is," he said. "We are not daffodils.

He would never know know her. Such intimacy but no communication, because words - even if she could speak or write them - could never explain her world to him.

One cannot try marriage. Once one is in, there is no way out.

She had held her life to an even keel by killing all deep feeling, by living upon the surface of life.

It is hard, is it not," he said, "to have one's life develop quite differently from what one expected and to feel not fully in command of it?

life was not easy. And what an earth-shatteringly original observation that was.

Ah, this feels just like the old times... I still miss you and the others, you know, and life at school and those times when two or more of us would sit up talking far too late into the night. Which is not to say I would give up my present life to return there, but... Well, even happy choices involve some sacrifice. And most of us, I suppose, would like to both have our cake and eat it if only it were possible

But he was well aware that the future could never be relied upon to be an improvement upon the present. The future did not exist. Only the present did.

Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.

Do you believe that sometimes life points out a way for us to follow even if it does not force us into taking that particular path?

I prefer to think of marriage as an equality of give and take.

I will love you all my life and even beyond that," he said. "You will always be my only love.

We sighted people are often neglectful of the power of sound.

Ben walked into the house and up the stairs with his two canes, but he propelled himself about much of the time after that in a wheeled chair, having decided that it was not an admission of defeat but rather a moving forward into a new, differently active phase of his life.

And then something blossomed deep within and opened almost like the multitude petals of a rose, pushing back the tension in rippling waves as they bloomed until she surrendered to relaxation with a soft exclamation of surprise

Sometimes, self-pity was so ingrained in people that nothing could persuade them to take joy out of living.

You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.

He was insulting her sex but complimenting her personally. Was she supposed to simper with gratitude?

war often wounds the soul as deeply as it does the body, sometimes more so.

this has been a birthday best forgotten." "Most birthdays are, milord," his man said agreeably

Your father is your f-father regardless, Agnes. Birth and b-breeding do not always depend upon small matters like who provided the seed.