Mary Balogh > Quotes

“I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.”
― Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Wicked

“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.”
― Mary Balogh

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web

“One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.”
― Mary Balogh, Seducing an Angel

“The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.”
― Mary Balogh, No Man's Mistress

“The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.”
― Mary Balogh, First Comes Marriage

“I have read somewhere that we often spend a lifetime searching for what we already have.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Married

“Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift.
He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic.
He was not, though.
He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business.
For receiving meant opening up the heart again.
Perhaps to rejection.
Or disillusionment.
Or pain.
Or even heart break.
It was all terribly risky.
And all terribly necessary.
And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...”
― Mary Balogh, At Last Comes Love

“My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.”
― Mary Balogh, First Comes Marriage

“I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.”
― Mary Balogh

“Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?”
― Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web

“The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.”
― Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web

“There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?”
― Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction

“Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction

“But the things is, you see, that two people can never actually become one no matter how close they are. And it would not be desirable even if it were possible. What would happen when one of them died? It would leave the other as a half a person, and that would be a dreadful thing. We must each be a whole person and therefore we each need some privacy to be alone with ourselves and our own feelings.”
― Mary Balogh, First Comes Marriage

“Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.”
― Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair

“This time her heart would not break, even though it would hurt and hurt for a long time to come. Perhaps for the rest of her life. But it would not break. She had the strength to go on alone.”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“It was strange how the heart clung to hope even when there was no reasonable basis for it, Morgan found. And how life went on.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Tempted

“But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?”
― Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction

“I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.”
― Mary Balogh, More Than a Mistress

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.”
― Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“Why do I want to run from happiness?”
― Mary Balogh, More Than a Mistress

“Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.”
― Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair

“It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.”
― Mary Balogh, First Comes Marriage

“Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.”
― Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair

“What sort of man could you love for a lifetime?" he asked her.
She was silent for a while. He guessed that she was considering her answer.
"A kind man," she said. "When we are young and foolish we do not realize how essential a component of love kindness is. It is perhaps the most important quality. And an honorable man. Always doing the right thing no matter what."
His heart sank-on both account.
"And a strong man," she said. "Strong enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to be honest even when honesty might expose him to ridicule or rejection. And someone who would put himself at the center of my world even before knowing that I would be willing to do the same for him. A man foolish and brave enough to tell me that he loves me even when I have hidden all signs that I love him in return."
"Eve-" he said.
"He would have to be tall and broad and dark and hook-nosed," she said. "And frowning much of the time, pretending he is tough and impervious to all the finer emotions. And then smiling occasionally to light up my heart and my life."
Good God!
"He would have to be you," she said. "no one else would do. Which is just as well, considering the fact that I am married to you...”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Married

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Dangerous

“And he knew at that moment that love world never die, that it would never fade away altogether. The time might come when he would meet and marry someone else. He might even be reasonably happy. But there would always be a deep precious place in his heart that belonged to his first real love.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“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.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Dangerous

“I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone."
"What do you fear then?" he asked her.
She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words.
"Never finding myself again....”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“The people we love are usually stronger than we give them credit for. It is the nature of love, perhaps, to want to shoulder all the pain rather than see the loved one suffer. But sometimes pain is better than emptiness. I have been so empty Kit. All my life. So full of emptiness. That is strange paradox is nit not - full of emptiness?”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“Sometimes it just seems that love is not enough, does it?”
― Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web

“It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember.
He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that he came to think about it, he must have it set right one of these days.Why should a clock be forced to go throught its entire existence four minutes behind the rest of the world? It was not logical.The trouble was though, that if the clock were suddenly right, he would be forever confused and arriving four minutes early -- or did he mena late? -- for meals and various other appointments. That would agitate his servants and cause consternation in the kitchen.
It was probably better to leave the clock as it was.”
― Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction

“Where was Bewcastle?
But then he was there, standing on the terrace some distance away, and such was the power of his presence that everyone seemed to sense it an fell back away from Alleyne even as they stopped talking. There was still all sorts of noise, of course - horses, carriage wheels, voices, the water spouting out of the fountain - but it seemed to Alleyne as if complete silence fell.
Bewcastle had already seen him. His gaze was steady and silver-eyed and inscrutable. His hand reached for the gold-handled, jewel-studded quizzing glass he always wore with formal attire and raised it halfway to his eyes in a characteristic gesture. Then he came striding along the terrace with uncharacteristic speed and did not stop coming until he had caught Alleyne up in a tight, wordless embrace that lasted perhaps a whole minute while Alleyne dipped his forehead to his brother's shoulder and felt at last that he was safe.
It was an extraordinary moment. He had been little more than a child when his father died, but Wulfric himself had been only seventeen. Alleyne had never thought of him as a father figure. Indeed, he had often resented the authority his brother wielded over them with such unwavering strictness, and often with apparant impersonality and lack of humor. He had always thought of his eldest brother as aloof, unfeeling, totally self sufficient. A cold fish. And yet it was in Wulfric's arm that he felt his homecoming most acutely. He felt finally and completely and unconditionally loved.
An extraordinary moment indeed.”
― Mary Balogh, Slightly Sinful