Mary Balogh

“Sometimes now was enough.Sometimes it was everything.”

“It is also for stepping into the unknown," Claudia said, "when it would be easier to cling what it familiar and safe.”

“Future indifferences is no consolation for present pain.”

“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.”

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

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

“Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love, I have discovered, does not judge. It just is.”

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

“Why do I want to run from happiness?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“It was strange how the heart clung to hope even when there was no reasonable basis for it, Morgan found. And how life went on.”

“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.”

“Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.”

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

“Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is.”

“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 teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?”

“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.”

“Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.Life itself had become a secret affair.”

“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?”

“Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.No one was shallow. Not really.”

“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 guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.”

“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?”

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

“Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.”

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

“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...”

“Sometimes," he said, "it is necessary to go back before we can move forward.”

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

“Was there to be some healing after all?Was healing possible when grave damage had been done?Was wholeness possible when one had been horribly maimed.”

“I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.”

“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.”

“Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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 imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.”

“And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but ...alive.”

“But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.”

“I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone.""What do you fear then?" he asked her.She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words."Never finding myself again....”