Top 200 Mary Balogh Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why would forgiveness be of any value if it were reserved only for forgivable offenses?”

— Mary Balogh

52. “She was Sophia Fry, though her name was rarely used. She was known by her relatives, when she was known as anything at all, and perhaps by their servants too, as the mouse.”

— Mary Balogh

53. “There is a terrible pain,” she said softly, “about being abandoned by someone who loves someone else more than you. A pain and an emptiness and a determination never again to give anyone that power.”

— Mary Balogh

54. “Gifts were dangerous things, she thought. Sometimes one succeeded only in taking far more than one gave.”

— Mary Balogh

55. “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

56. “One could not live forever, though, upon memories and dreams. One could not forever ignore the fact that one was alone and that perhaps one would be alone for the rest of one’s life.”

— Mary Balogh

57. “Sometimes one feels the need of a word more powerful than love, or at least one more exclusive to the love of one’s heart.”

— Mary Balogh

58. “I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.”

— Mary Balogh

59. “You are my flesh and blood and I have always doted on you, but right now I would have to say you deserve a haughty, ruined chit for your own and she deserves you.”

— Mary Balogh

60. “It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.”

— Mary Balogh

61. “One should love from a position of wholeness. One should have a firm and rich sense of self no matter what. For there is always pain – it cannot be avoided in this life, more’s the pity. But pain should not destroy the person who feels it.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

63. “Yet now he felt that perhaps he had missed one of the few chances life offered to step off the wheel of routine and familiarity and duty to discover if there was joy somewhere beyond its turning.”

— Mary Balogh

64. “People, especially some religious people. would have us believe that it is wrong. even a sin, to love oneself. It is not. It is the basic, essential love. If you do not love yourself, you cannot possibly love anyone else. Not fully and truly.”

— Mary Balogh

65. “The branches of most of the trees were bare now. He had never minded bare trees. He could see the sky through them. He had often lain along a stout branch, gazing upward, dreaming of worlds beyond the one he inhabited.”

— Mary Balogh

66. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

67. “The comforting thing about difficult days, Chloe had learned from experience, was that the sun rose at the start of them and set at the end just as it did on any other day. And there was always the assurance of better days ahead.”

— Mary Balogh

68. “His years of dependency were past. It was time to grow up and take charge. It was not going to be easy. But he had long ago realized that he must treat his blindness as a challenge rather than as a handicap if he wished to enjoy anything like a happy, fulfilled life.”

— Mary Balogh

69. “Life was very sad if there were not – and unbearably so if one’s experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic.”

— Mary Balogh

70. “Idleness was so often despised. And yet it was on idleness, she knew, that one touched meaning and peace.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

72. “It is just a pity,” he added, “that some things can never be entirely forgotten just by trying. But we have all learned that lesson.”

— Mary Balogh

73. “Hugo could cheerfully have died of mortification – if such a mass of contradictions had been possible.”

— Mary Balogh

74. “There is something about boys,” she said, “that makes them think it is unmanly to show any feelings other than scorn and irritation or any enthusiasm for anything. It is a very unattractive trait.”

— Mary Balogh

75. “Life is always like that,” he said gently. “We are what we are because of what has happened to us in the past. We cannot change that and we should not wish to. I love you as you are, Elizabeth. Perhaps I would not love you as well if you had not met and loved and lost Hetherington. Perhaps the experience has given you the air of maturity and serenity that I so admire in you. Give me your future, my dear. I do not ask for the past.”

— Mary Balogh

76. “One does tend to assume that life must be far easier for others than it ever is for oneself,” he said. “I suspect it rarely is. I daresay life was not meant to be easy.”

— Mary Balogh

77. “It was almost as if she had been lulled into a sleep long ago and had been hovering on the brink of waking but had resisted doing so. Sometimes it was more comfortable to remain asleep than to be awake.”

— Mary Balogh

78. “We would have met again some other time or in some other place,′ he said. ‘We would have been given other chances. Life recognizes the unpredictability of our movements in any given life. Somehow we would have met, Jane. We were determined that it would be so before we entered this life.”

— Mary Balogh

79. “If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle.”

— Mary Balogh

80. “She wanted it to last forever. She wanted him in her. She wanted release. She could not endure much longer without release. But not yet. Not yet. She wanted the wanting him to go on forever. She did not want thought or sanity or the cold and cruel world to come back. She wanted this to go on forever.”

— Mary Balogh

81. “But one never quite reached the point at which one could relax and know that one had made it through to the other side of suffering and could now be simply content, even happy, inside a balanced mix of body, mind, and spirit.”

— Mary Balogh

82. “Sometimes she felt that her heart would ssurely break. But she knew that hearts did not literally break because their owners were unhappy – and foolish. How dreadfully foolish she had been. Yet she clung to the memories as to a lifeline.”

— Mary Balogh

83. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

84. “You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.”

— Mary Balogh

85. “I do not understand dalliance, Lord Ponsonby.” “But you are d-drawn to it, Mrs. Keeping.”

— Mary Balogh

86. “But if you do get to know me, please let me know what you discover. I have no idea who I am.”

— Mary Balogh

87. “Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October – though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever?”

— Mary Balogh

88. “She wanted so badly to believe him. She sat on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes. And she realized what had been happening to her over the past weeks. He had been turning – so gradually that she had scarcely noticed the transition – from her nightmare into her dream. Because.”

— Mary Balogh

89. “The only point that troubled me, I must confess, is that Miss Tallant dislikes being called Henrietta. But I thought people might be confused if I announced my betrothal to Henry Tallant. Some few might even be scandalized, do you not agree, Oliver?”

— Mary Balogh

90. “And then something blossomed deep within and opened almost like the multitude petals of a rose, pushing back the tension in rippling waves as they bloomed until she surrendered to relaxation with a soft exclamation of surprise.”

— Mary Balogh

91. “We can always do anything as long as we are alive. We can always change, grow, evolve into a far better version of ourselves. It is surely what life is for.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

93. “But it was possible to teach what one could not practice.”

— Mary Balogh

94. “Are you afraid of the storm, by the way? I have two perfectly free arms with which to shelter you if you are.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

96. “We women are impractical because we have hearts. Not that men do not, but they feel things differently. They do not feel the suffering around them, or, if they do, they know how to harden their hearts when it has nothing to do with them.”

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

98. “We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.”

— Mary Balogh

99. “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.”

— Mary Balogh

100. “But he was well aware that the future could never be relied upon to be an improvement upon the present. The future did not exist. Only the present did.”

— Mary Balogh