Top 200 Mary Balogh Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mary Balogh

2. “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?”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

7. “A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

9. “The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one’s one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

11. “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

12. “I do not admire greatness that has no substance.”

— Mary Balogh

13. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

14. “Sometimes other people’s words become uncomfortable mirrors in which we gaze upon ourselves.”

— Mary Balogh

15. “Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

17. “Negativity could be frighteningly contagious.”

— Mary Balogh

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?”

— Mary Balogh

22. “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

23. “And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language.”

— Mary Balogh

24. “I believe tnat life is very generous with us once we have shown the will to take a positive course. It is ery ready to keep on opening doors for us. It is just that sometimes we lose our willpower and courage adn prefer to stay on the familiar, safe side of each door.”

— Mary Balogh

25. “I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.”

— Mary Balogh

26. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

27. “Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.”

— Mary Balogh

28. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

29. “I have read somewhere that we often spend a lifetime searching for what we already have.”

— Mary Balogh

30. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

31. “I will love you all my life and even beyond that,” he said. “You will always be my only love.”

— Mary Balogh

32. “One does not simply read books... one climbs inside them and lives there.”

— Mary Balogh

33. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

35. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

36. “Sometimes it just seems that love is not enough, does it?”

— Mary Balogh

37. “It is a rude awakening, is it not, to discover that people change, or that they have other facets to their character that we did not suspect?”

— Mary Balogh

38. “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

39. “Suffering can kill. Not always physically. But it can kill dreams and it can deaden hope and the will to live.”

— Mary Balogh

40. “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?”

— Mary Balogh

41. “This time her heart would not break, even though it would hurt and hurt for a long time to come. Perhaps for the rest of her life. But it would not break. She had the strength to go on alone.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

43. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

45. “If you have always suspected your sister of an inclination to madness, it will be my pleasure to confirm your worst fears.”

— Mary Balogh

46. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

47. “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

48. “Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo. It just simply was.”

— Mary Balogh

49. “Your sense of guilt will linger. It will always be part of you. but sharing it, allowing people to love you anyway, will do you the world of good. Secrets need an outlet if they are not to fester and become an unbearable burden.”

— Mary Balogh

50. “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