Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?

— Mary Balogh

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.

— Mary Balogh

Did people... really kiss like that? She had had NO idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naïveté she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places

— Mary Balogh

Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.

— Mary Balogh

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

— Mary Balogh

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 rule ours hearts.'' Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.'' And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

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

— Mary Balogh

Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. Furthermore, it was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift. He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic. Furthermore, he was not, though. He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business. For receiving meant opening up the heart again. Perhaps to rejection. Or disillusionment. Or pain. Or even heart break. It was all terribly risky. And all terribly necessary. And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...

— Mary Balogh