An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

There are few comforts as satisfying as a warm fire, a cozy bed, and a delicious meal after one has been chilled to the bone with wind and rain.

There are few things I despise more than people who constantly quote platitudes. It demonstrates a painful lack of originality.

It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman’s vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

We did not require one another, for neither of us was deficient. But we enhanced one another, we bettered one another.

It has been my experience that when one is accosted by a lowness of spirits due to some failing in one’s character, it becomes a habit to seek out and prod any other failing. Self-loathing is a habit, and one I could not afford to indulge.

What, I began to wonder, was the point of allowing a gentleman access to one’s bed and heart if he could not interpret a lady’s most irrational moods?

You madden me. You distract me. You enrage me. I cannot think of any person of my acquaintance who has so often and so thoroughly driven me to the brink of endurance. And yet you saved me. Whatever that melancholy state, it has been banished, and I know it is because I wake every day knowing that you are there.”

“She is a woman,” Sir Hugo said simply. “And she has no money. It is up to her brother to look after her, and it is her lot to make herself happy within that.”

“Because it was not my place to redeem you. The only person who can do that is you.”

“It takes courage to live a good life, Harry, but it also takes courage to live like a blackguard. Both require difficult choices. Both require hardship and endurance and patience. There is, in the end, little difference between the good and the bad. Only one of these lives requires you to look over your shoulder all the while and the other one makes it a little easier to sleep at night.”

“The mistake you made was in thinking she was a bit player in your story,” Stoker told him. “She is mistress of her own fate and she bends to no man.”

Division from Stoker, in any form, was like an amputation of the soul, and I would do anything to bridge the abyss between us.