Mary Balogh

“I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.”

“His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I never think that any writer can teach someone how to write.”

“Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?”

“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.”

“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.”

“But marriage is forever.''Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, 'though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.”

“Everyone writes differently. I hope to get people energized so they'll want to rush home to write.”

“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.”

“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.”