Mary Balogh Quotes & Sayings

Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing. — Mary Balogh

Was something worth having, though, if it didn't present a challenge? — 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

Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability. — Mary Balogh

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

Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts. — Mary Balogh

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

Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is. — Mary Balogh

One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up. — Mary Balogh

Had she read any good books lately? At all? She could tell him that she was going to take out a subscription at the library tomorrow because she was feeling starved of good reading material and could he recommend anything that she might not already have read? — Mary Balogh

He was being the scrupulously honorable gentleman, she realized, protecting her name, taking the consequences of his own indiscretion. She understood all that and was grateful for it. And resentful of it. How helpless women were. The pawns of men. To be tripped up and pitched headlong into the dirt by men, and then to be picked up by them and dusted off and restored to uprightness. But that was the way of the world. — Mary Balogh

Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October - though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever? — Mary Balogh

Dreams are wishes that will in all probability never come true. (Sophie) — Mary Balogh

Forever is not granted to any of us," the duchess said. "Even tomorrow is not granted as by right. Any of us can go at any moment. — Mary Balogh

But life and pain go hand and hand. On e cannot live fully unless one faces pain at least occasionally. — Mary Balogh

To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations. — Mary Balogh

Ladies did not allow fear to master them. Ladies did not abjure society merely because they were embarrassed and unhappy, merely because they felt unattractive and unwanted. Ladies did not give in to self-pity. — Mary Balogh

Your dog has not lost any time in catching up on his beauty sleep." "Just do not utter any word that begins with w," she said, "especially with the letters a-l-k attached. You would soon discover how deeply asleep he is. — Mary Balogh

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. — Mary Balogh

One does tend to assume that life must be far easier for others than it ever is for oneself," he said. "I suspect it rarely is. I daresay life was not meant to be easy. — Mary Balogh

If I had smiled and fawned over you at Lady Mannering's ball," she said, "and if I had simpered and giggled during the drive in Hyde Park, you would have lost interest in me in a moment, Lord Ravensberg."
"Good Lord, yes," he agreed. Perceptive of her.
"I would thank you not to take the Lord's name in vain," she said so primly that he was momentarily enchanted. "I see that I have behaved in quite the wrong manner with you. I should have encouraged you."
"There is always time," he suggested, moving his chair half an inch closer to hers, "to mend your ways, Miss Edgeworth. — Mary Balogh

But it was possible to teach what one could not practice. — Mary Balogh

Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed? — Mary Balogh

Love does not involve emotions, then?" he asked her with a smile.
"It is not ruled by them," she told him. "Love is liking and companionship and respect and trust. Love does not dominate or try to possess. Love thrives only in a commitment to pure, mutual freedom. That is why marriage is so tricky. There are the marriage ceremony and the marriage vows and the necessity for fidelity -all of them suggestive of restraints, even imprisonment. Men talk of life sentences and leg shackles in connection with marriage, do they not? But marriage out to be just the opposite -two people agreeing to set each other free, — Mary Balogh

Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery. — Mary Balogh

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

I think it is more tha6 the sea is a reminder of how little control we have over our own lives no matter how carefully we try to plan and order them. Everything changes in ways we least expect, and everything is frighteningly vast. We are so small. — Mary Balogh

There is something about boys," she said, "that makes them think it is unmanly to show any feelings other than scorn and irritation or any enthusiasm for anything. It is a very unattractive trait. — Mary Balogh

Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain. — Mary Balogh

Why is it," she asked, snuggling closer, "that I so often imagine myself running away and running free? — Mary Balogh

We can all be hurt. — Mary Balogh

Hugo could cheerfully have died of mortification - if such a mass of contradictions had been possible. — Mary Balogh

People, especially some religious people. would have us believe that it is wrong . even a sin, to love oneself. It is not. It is the basic, essential love. If you do not love yourself, you cannot possibly love anyone else. Not fully and truly. — Mary Balogh

And I need you, my love," he said. "I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that - Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you."
"To look after Augusta?" she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. "To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?"
"Yes," he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet."And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover. — Mary Balogh

My woman. She had a momentary image of a caveman, hanging on to his woman by the hair with one hand while in the other he wielded a club to beat back caveman number two. Perhaps she would sketch it one day. — Mary Balogh

He asked me not to kill myself - asked, not told. His wife had done that, he told me, and it was in a sense the ultimate act of selfishness since it left behind untold and endless suffering for those who had witnessed it and been unable to do anything to prevent it. And so I remained alive. — Mary Balogh

There is no such thing as time. There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life. — Mary Balogh

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for? — Mary Balogh

As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.
But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too. — Mary Balogh

How fragile were the moments of chance on which the whole course of one's life hinged. — Mary Balogh

Love wasn't about reasons. It wasn't about admiring fine qualities. Love was a language all on its own, composed of gestures that seemed incomprehensible, perhaps even pointless, to the outside observer. Speaking — Mary Balogh

He wished he understood women better. It was a well-known fact that they did not mean half of what they said.
But which half did they mean? — Mary Balogh

What do you not have, Lord Hardford?" she asked. "For no one has everything, you know, or even nearly everything. — Mary Balogh

played any sort of game. Ten. — 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

Why say something," he asked her, "if your words mean nothing? — Mary Balogh

...but most roads I have learned from past experience lead somewhere eventually. — Mary Balogh

But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of? — Mary Balogh

You are usually in a different universe," she said, "one that revolves about you. The Peninsula was full of rude, blustering officers who believed other people had been created to pay them homage. I always thought they were merely silly and best ignored. — Mary Balogh

He knew he was alive when he was with her, whatever the devil that meant.
Whatever the devil it did mean, it made all the difference.
And he was not even sure what that meant. — Mary Balogh

It was beginning to feel like an almost familiar place to be. But perhaps hitting this new low had something to be said for it, she thought now, this morning, after she had awoken and realized in some surprise that she had slept for several hours. At least now there was no further down to go. And — Mary Balogh

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

There is no such place as the promised land, but it would be foolish to reject even an unpromised land as worthless without first inspecting it thoroughly. — Mary Balogh

Eunice Goddard," he said, all pretense of sleepiness gone from his eyes, "will you marry me? I have no flowery speech prepared and would feel remarkably idiotic delivering it even if I had. Will you just simply marry me, my love? Because I love you? Will you take the risk? I am fully aware that there is a risk. I can only urge you to take a chance on me while I promise to do my very best to love and cherish you for the rest of my days and even perhaps beyond them. — Mary Balogh

Life was very sad if there were not - and unbearably so if one's experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic. — Mary Balogh

I suppose," he said, his voice harsher than he had intended it to be, "you want marriage again." "No," she said quickly. "No, never that. Not again. Why would any woman willingly make herself the property of a man and suffer all the humiliation of submerging her character and her very identity in his? — Mary Balogh

Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is. — Mary Balogh

He watched her go, wondering if life ever offered happiness in more than very small, very brief doses. T — Mary Balogh

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. — Mary Balogh

How easy it is to dismiss the outer packaging without an inkling that one is thereby missing the precious beauty within. — Mary Balogh

Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at
heart. — Mary Balogh

Have you noticed,' she asked, straightening the counting frames to her liking before closing the cupboard doors and turning toward him, 'that at church when the clergyman is giving his sermon everyone's eyes glaze over and many people even nod off to sleep? But if he suddenly decides to illustrate a point with a little story, everyone perks up and listens. WE were made to tell and listen to stories, Joel, It is how knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation before there was the written word, and even afterward, when most people had no access to manuscripts or books and could not read them even if they did. Why do we now feel that storytelling should be confined to fiction and fantasy? Can we enjoy only what has no basis in fact? — Mary Balogh

I am free, you see," she said, "to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you. — Mary Balogh

Pain is not insignificant. Neither is bewilderment or fear. Or conditions like poverty or homelessness. But somewhere - somewhere - there is peace. It is not even far off. It is somewhere deep inside us, in fact, ever present, just waiting for us to look inward to find it. She — Mary Balogh

Everyone had run to do her bidding. Soon only the three men
the three useless ones
had been left in the sitting room to fight terror and nausea and fits of the vapors.
The door opened. Three pale, terrified faces turned toward it.
-the three manly men waiting during a childbirth — 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

- The idea that love conquers all may seem to be a foolishly idealistic one, but I believe in it nonetheless. How can I believe otherwise? If love cannot conquer all, what can? Hatred? Violence? Despair? — Mary Balogh

I am still not used to being the possessor of such a grand title. I believe I shall have to start wearing a purple satin turban and carrying a lorgnette. — Mary Balogh

We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow. — Mary Balogh

Well,' Frederick had said, 'I will see what can be arranged, Archie. But I will not have the girl frightened or compromised.'
'You sound like a grandfather who has raised fifteen daughters and is now starting on his granddaughters, Freddie,' Lord Archibald had said. 'It is most disconcerting. — 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

But parents, she supposed, were not the pinnacle of perfection their children thought or expected them to be. They were humans who usually did the best they could but often made the wrong choices. — Mary Balogh

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

Tis what marriage is all about, madam," he said. "Have you not realized it? 'Tis about discovering unknown facets of the character and experience and taste of one's spouse and learning to adjust one's life accordingly. 'Tis learning to hope that one's spouse is doing the same thing. — Mary Balogh

Good Lord, even to his own ears they sounded like a pair of coconspirators being so overhearty in their enthusiastic simulation of innocence that they proclaimed themselves as guilty as hell. — Mary Balogh

We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same. — Mary Balogh

But he was not Matthew. He was everything that Matthew was not. He was safety and comfort and warmth. He was home. He was everything in the world that was hope and sunshine. He took a step toward her and opened his arms to her, and she was in those arms without ever knowing how the distance between them had closed. — 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

Little people are often more fierce than their larger counterparts[ ... ] — Mary Balogh

Do you have anyone in mind, Hugo?" the duke asked. "Not really." Hugo sighed. "I have an army of female cousins and aunts who would be only too — Mary Balogh

My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make. — Mary Balogh

It was what remained to a relationship after the first euphoria of the romance had faded. — 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

A funny thing, love. It was not always, or even mostly, a sexual thing. — Mary Balogh

We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts when it has nothing to do with them. — Mary Balogh

You just have not...oh, learned who yo are yet. — 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

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

Openness and truth between partners were necessary if the marriage was to have a chance of bringing them any sort of happiness. — Mary Balogh

I do not admire greatness that has no substance. — Mary Balogh

Ah, but dreams cannot be captured with promises," he said. "Like water, they elude our grasp. But water is the staff of life. I believe your dream will come true if only because you will not compromise on it and let it go too lightly. — Mary Balogh

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

Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.'
'There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.'
'Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.'
'And love,' he said, 'is our destiny. — Mary Balogh

If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck. — Mary Balogh

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

There are voices that are lovely for various reasons or annoying for other reasons [ ... ] — Mary Balogh

Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks? — Mary Balogh

They were all true today but tomorrow they would be a little less so and next week less so again. It was in the nature of strong emotion that it faded away over time. — Mary Balogh

I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it! — Mary Balogh