Mary Balogh (rhymes with Kellogg, born Mary Jenkins on 24 March 1944 in Swansea, Wales) is a Welsh-Canadian novelist writing historical romance.
And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language
The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.
After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.
I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.
I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.
Love does not last forever, then?" "He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
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?
There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.
Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world.
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?
Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being. No one was shallow. Not really.
Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.
Why do I want to run from happiness?
He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a place to be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again to leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears. Very much on the verge of tears. And very frightened.
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
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.
Sometimes now was enough. Sometimes it was everything.
Sometimes children do not realize by how fragile a thread their security hangs. Perhaps it is as well they do not - most of them grow up before the thread can be broken.
The people we love are usually stronger than we give them credit for. It is the nature of love, perhaps, to want to shoulder all the pain rather than see the loved one suffer. But sometimes pain is better than emptiness. I have been so empty Kit. All my life. So full of emptiness. That is strange paradox is nit not - full of emptiness?
It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.