Quotes from Julie Anne Long

And I served as an officer in the army." "Very impressive. I've been told that war is boredom interspersed with violence and terror.

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

Because that's what happened to fury when tenderness was applied. It dissolved.

Poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time. Alexander Moncrieffe

She felt the pain of his loss inside her like a savage hook. She wanted to reach into him and take it out, as though it were shrapnel. But the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accommodated it. He had loved and he had lost and it had made him who he was.

The message was sealed with a blob of wax but no press of a signet. She slid a finger beneath to crack the seal, and read: I apologize if I've ever behaved like an ass. It was the most romantic message she'd ever received. All other messages would strive to live up to it for the rest of her days. She was convinced of that in the moment.

I know what you think of me, Miles. I know what you--have thought of me. But I have a heart. I do have a heart. I just cannot afford to use it. Don't you see? Why can't you see this? Whereas you--may play at all of this as much as you like. There will always be someone for you. And that is the difference. I cannot afford to use my heart. And you--you choose not to use yours.' - Cynthia Brightley to Miles Redmond

What happens next? she whispered. Connor turned to her and smiled faintly. Always a question, that was Rebecca. There's more? he said in mock wonderment Rebecca dimpled. You know very well there is more. Tell me all about it, he encouraged. In Papa's book— Tell me all about it without mentioning your papa.

And before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and with a thumb brushed away one teardrop glistening in that mauve crescent beneath her eyes. And then he looked down at his thumb, and rubbed the tear out of existence, right into his skin.

Vicars, he often thought, are essentially God's lawyers on the earth. Interpreters of the law, the finders of nuance, sifters through rationalizations to get at the truth or the need of the moment. Guessers, in other words.

Do you think Kinkade is Welland-Dowd? she wondered Chase burst into laughter so booming that every head on the street rotated, startled. Oh,God. She'd just understood when she'd said it aloud. Welland-Dowd. Well-endowed.

It's just a part of her life. Sewing her world back together again, sometimes even daily.

I have learned that everyone else in the world is boring except you.

Jules was frozen with incredulity. In truth, he could not speak. He was touched by the display of honor in two country squires, and by the humbling - in truth hilarious - definitive evidence that some things were beyond his control. And life knew what was best for him better than he did, and had brought it to him, not with graceful precision, but with magnificent, ridiculous poetry.

Sometimes, the only way out of the fire is through the fire, m'boy.

Irony, when delivered cold and shaved very, very fine, could sound like amusement.

I took a fall," he confirmed evenly. After a hesitation doubtless only Phoebe noticed. And Phoebe didn't know whether it was the sort of fall Lucifer took, or the sort poets wrote about when love struck, or even if it was an innuendo at all, because she suspected everything was destined to sound like an innuendo from now on.

The wrong man could have brought it all crashing down," she told him. "A different man might have collapsed under the weight of the responsibility.

Charm, my dear, Cynthia wanted to tell her, is not learned, it is innate. And it is honed by desperation and need and sharpened by application. If you want the truth, that is.

He regarded her thoughtfully, and something about that look traveled up her spine like a trailed finger.

They immediately spent a moment in bemused silence in honor of the perilous little paradox that was the English female

And as she looked back at him, she felt the serrated edges of her heart in her chest. But also a sort of dizzying vastness: she could face anything now.

Beautiful. Jules once thought he'd understood what the word meant. He now believed it overused. Some word needed to be kept in reserve for the rare, the arresting, the surprising . . . the magical. Or a new one invented.

Before him and since he'd gone away, she'd either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else. She was only ever wholly herself with him.