After a few awkward moments, Lizzy joined them, and they skipped along the avenue, the three of them, laughing and whooping and altogether making an undignified spectacle of themselves.

— Mary Balogh

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.

— Mary Balogh

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?

— Mary Balogh

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

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

And I need you, my love," he said. "I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that—Well, the words speak for themselves. Furthermore, I need you."" To look after Augusta?" she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. "To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?"" Yes," he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet." And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover.

— Mary Balogh

And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. Furthermore, he disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy. He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it. He was not amused. Or in any way pleased.

— Mary Balogh

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

— 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.

— Mary Balogh

As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped. But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too.

— Mary Balogh