Mary Balogh Quotes

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

There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.

~ Mary Balogh

Why do I want to run from happiness?

~ Mary Balogh

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

~ Mary Balogh

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

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

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

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

But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.

~ Mary Balogh

Life is a precious possession...It is what one makes of it. - Charity Duncan

~ 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

You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.

~ Mary Balogh

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

~ Mary Balogh

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

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

~ Mary Balogh

Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.

~ Mary Balogh

You really love me? she asked wistfully.The devil! he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?

~ Mary Balogh

It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew.How impossible it was to know another human being.How impossible to know even oneself.

~ Mary Balogh

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

~ Mary Balogh

The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?

~ Mary Balogh

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

~ Mary Balogh

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?

~ Mary Balogh

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

The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.

~ Mary Balogh

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

~ Mary Balogh

One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest.

~ Mary Balogh

Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.

~ Mary Balogh

But marriage is forever.''Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, 'though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you.

~ Mary Balogh

But marriage is forever.''Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you.

~ Mary Balogh

His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.

~ Mary Balogh

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.

~ Mary Balogh

But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams.

~ Mary Balogh

All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?

~ Mary Balogh

People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it.

~ Mary Balogh

But that is what life is all about, he said. It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love.

~ Mary Balogh

But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong.

~ Mary Balogh

There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything.

~ Mary Balogh

Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.

~ Mary Balogh

He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a placeto be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again toleave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.Very much on the verge of tears.And very frightened.

~ Mary Balogh

One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.

~ Mary Balogh