Balogh Quotes & Sayings

The only thing you can neither plan nor control, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, is love itself. When you find it, you must yield to it. But only if it is the one and only true passion of your life. Never if it is anything less than that, or life will consume you.
But how am I to know? She had asked him.
You will know. — Mary Balogh

It's this idea that success changes you as a person ... I've never seen my career that way. — 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

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

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

Sometimes, self-pity was so ingrained in people that nothing could persuade them to take joy out of living. — Mary Balogh

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

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

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

What happened was pain and pleasure and shock and satisfaction all rolled into one. Pain as he withdrew and thrust over and over again past the soreness of her newly opened womanhood. Pleasure because it was more wonderful, more exhilirating, than any other sensation she had ever experienced. Shock because she had not expected such a deep and vigorous and prolonged invasion of her body. Satisfaction because now, before it was too late, he was her lover. Because she would always be able to remember him as her lover — Mary Balogh

this has been a birthday best forgotten."
"Most birthdays are, milord," his man said agreeably — Mary Balogh

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

By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting - a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had
had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist - even, perhaps, a murderer - could not take away from her. — Mary Balogh

Perhaps we should do the learning - and learn not to communicate, or to do it in a different way. Now there is a thought. Perhaps we could learn your peace if we could share your silence. — 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

Suffering can kill. Not always physically. But it can kill dreams and it can deaden hope and the will to live. — Mary Balogh

Ah, my love. Once dreams were shattered, there could be no assurance that they could ever be pieced together and dreamed again. — 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

I came, he said.
Good Lord! If there were an orator-of-the-year award, he would be in dire danger of winning it. — Mary Balogh

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

There is a terrible pain," she said softly, "about being abandoned by someone who loves someone else more than you. A pain and an emptiness and a determination never again to give anyone that power. — Mary Balogh

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

There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it.
What the devil was the reason? — 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

She wanted so badly to believe him. She sat on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes. And she realized what had been happening to her over the past weeks. He had been turning - so gradually that she had scarcely noticed the transition - from her nightmare into her dream. Because — 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

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

Where would we go?' she asked.
'Far, far away.' His eyes dipped to her lips when she moistened them with her tongue.
'Ah.' Her voice was a breathless whisper. 'The very best place to go. — 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

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

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

We can always do anything as long as we are alive. We can always change, grow, evolve into a far better version of ourselves. It is surely what life is for. — Mary Balogh

Home had always been a place to dream of. — Mary Balogh

For some people, happiness consists in waiting for some disaster to overtake them or the world, — Mary Balogh

The ladies perhaps had the advantage in the sheer size of — Mary Balogh

Do you believe that sometimes life points out a way for us to follow even if it does not force us into taking that particular path? — Mary Balogh

After you have broken my heart and left me, I will remember that we are always and ever connected. — 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

I am your husband. When you feel lonely or afraid or unhappy, it is to me you must come. My arms are here for you, and my strength too for whatever it is worth. You will never be a burden to me. — Mary Balogh

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

I never think that any writer can teach someone how to write. — Mary Balogh

And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ... alive. — Mary Balogh

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

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

I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise. — 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

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

He would never know know her. Such intimacy but no communication, because words - even if she could speak or write them - could never explain her world to him. — Mary Balogh

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments. — 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

My mind cannot grasp forever," she told him. "There must surely be an end somewhere. But the big question is-what it beyond the end? — Mary Balogh

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it. — Mary Balogh

Stanbrook once told me," he said, "that suicide is the worst kind of selfishness, as it is often a plea to specific people who are left stranded in the land of the living, unable for all eternity to answer the plea — Mary Balogh

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

That was the heart of the difference, she thought. In her world she had learned to be . Other people seemed to gain their sense of identity and worth from doing. — Mary Balogh

Sometimes love was to be grasped in any form and in any manner it was offered. And sometimes love must be given in the same way. — Mary Balogh

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect. — Mary Balogh

crowded about the four sides of the green to watch and cheer. Viola had set out from home early in the morning looking ladylike and elegant in a muslin dress and shawl and straw bonnet, her hair in a neatly braided coronet about her head beneath it. She had even been wearing gloves. But she had long ago discarded all the accessories. Even her hair, slipping stubbornly out of its pins during the busy morning of rushing hither and yon, had been allowed finally to hang loose in a long braid down — 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

Sed lex, dura lex," said Balogh. The latin phrase had been hammered into them from the first day of the Academy, and Simon was comming to hate the sound of it -so often was it used as an excuse for acting like monsters. — Cassandra Clare

I fancy the romantic image of myself being soothed and inspired by music and the sweet aroma and flickering lights of candles. — Mary Balogh

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

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

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

You will find that wanting, even loving, is not enough. — 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

They were stranded on the opposite sides of death, at least for now, and that was all there was to it. — Mary Balogh

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

And so silence and ... darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly.
"Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything. — Mary Balogh

Now was the time for now. Now was one of those rare and precious moments with which one was gifted from time to time. That was all it was. A moment. But it was one to be enjoyed to the full while it lasted and treasured for a lifetime after it was over. — Mary Balogh

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

Perhaps today was all that mattered. Perhaps today was all anyone could expect. Perhaps tomorrow was always an illusion that never came. — 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

It takes chracter to refuse a man you love more dearly than life merely because marrying him would be the wrong thing to do. — Mary Balogh

It is hard, is it not," he said, "to have one's life develop quite differently from what one expected and to feel not fully in command of it? — Mary Balogh

Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved. And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals - the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her. Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness. He — Mary Balogh

Why was it that silence sometimes felt like a physical thing with a weight of its own? — 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

When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone. — 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

If she allowed herself to wallow in self-pity, she would be in danger of becoming one of those habitual moaners and complainers everyone avoided. — 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

If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle. — Mary Balogh

This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite."
"Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him.
"Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful ... — Mary Balogh

Why , instead of teaching her poetry and drama and needlework, had her governesses not taught the most important lesson anyone could learn - that life was really not going to be easy after one was free of the schoolroom? — Mary Balogh