Quotes by 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 guil...”

“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 ...”

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

“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 ...”

“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 compro...”

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

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

“Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can ima...”

“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?”

“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 p...”

“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. ...”

“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 h...”

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

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

“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?”

“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 beautifu...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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 c...”