Mary Balogh

There is something infinitely better than happily-ever-after. There is happiness. Happiness is a living, dynamic thing, Eve, and has to be worked on every moment for the rest of our lives. It is a far more exciting prospect than that silly static idea of a happily-ever-after. Would you not agree?" - Aidan Bedwyn

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

Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.

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.

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

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

Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.

One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up.

It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.

I do not admire greatness that has no substance.

He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done.

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

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

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

She had made reason and common sense her gods. She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she unstood to be her mentors.

There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it.What the devil was the reason?

She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it.

Life is a precious possession...It is what one makes of it. - Charity Duncan