Mary Balogh Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Why do I want to run from happiness?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes her capacity for self-deception disturbed her.

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?

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?

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.

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

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.

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

Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.