Quotes by 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.

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.

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 ones 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.

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

I believe,” he said gently, “we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.

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.

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

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.

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

Love is wanting to be with someone all the time.It is accepting the other person with all good qualities and bad and not wanting to change any of them. It is wanting to give affection and approval and comfort and everything that is oneself,demanding nothing in return. It is - love is very difficult, Julia. It is an ideal, rarely achieved in reality because we are all selfish and imperfect beings. It is a dream, a goal, something to be aimed for.

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

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. Praps 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, praps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. Praps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. Praps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.

I know it is something of a cliche to say that love makes all things possible, but I believe it does. It is not a magic wand that can be waved over life to make it all sweet and lovely and trouble free, but it can give the energy to fight the odds and win.

The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.

The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.

But there were certain moments in life that forever defined one as a person - in ones own estimation, anyway. And ones own self esteem, when all was said and done, was of far more importance than the fickle esteem of ones peers.

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.

The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than ones one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.