I’ll be your friend in daylight. I’ll treat you as a comrade in every gas-lit ballroom. But alone, under moonlight, I’ll not pretend that I want you for anything but mine.
Over the years, everyone stumbles. That’s why I’ll be here for you — and you’ll be there for me. I don’t expect perfection. I want you, and you’re a thousand times better.
Maybe that’s what I have been looking for. When storms and rockslides threaten, I am looking for someone who will hold on to me and not let go.
You could make me say it again,” he whispered. “Make me say it always. Make me say it so often that you never have cause to doubt. I love you.
Friendship was a concept men bandied about to save face when they were rejected.
This is why people are so hard to understand. I cannot even estimate their gravitational pull.
If a man ever lets you know that he sees marriage as a trap, and women as nothing but scheming connivers, you are by no means to marry him. Any man that sees your entire sex in so harsh a light has nothing to offer you.
She looked like a woman talking about astronomical parallax, and that made her brilliantly beautiful.
He knew taht many of his compatriots avoided marriage at all costs. They saw matrimony as an annoyance, a wife as another person who would nag and prod. But when he repeated his vows, he heard “as long as we both shall life” and he hoped.
I think that’s when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.
One mustn’t justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat.
A man must claim responsibility for his own temptation, and not pin it on the woman who arouses him. It’s a gown, Sir Mark. Not even one of my more daring ones.
Men touch their horses to calm them,” she said distantly. “They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.
What would one do if one were forced to choose between saving an innocent child’s life or engaging in unchaste behavior? This is, after all, the choice that some unfortunate women are put to—sell their bodies, or see their children starve.
When someone else’s safety and acceptance in society is on the line, your personal discomfort comes in a very distant second.
He wasn’t good with this sort of thing – with the back-and-forth dance between man and woman. He wasn’t even sure if they were dancing, or if she was merely being polite.
His past followed him around as faithfully as his shadow.
I’d tell you to fetch a match, but you have always had your own spark.
Her lips found his and a stab of exquisite desire shot through him. This is what he’s been waiting for all this time. Not a stolen embrace. A gift, freely given. One that he would keep forever in some small part of his soul.
I fear that one day I will no longer understand desperation, and with that, I will slowly stop listening to what others have to say.
…having you as a friend wasn’t second prize. It wasn’t something to chafe against. It was an honor.
Sir Mark Turner,” he said. “I speak with the tongues of a thousand angels. Butterflies follow me wherever I go. Birds sing when I take a breath.
This was met with a long pause. “Are you really left-handed?” Mr. Marshall asked.“No. I’ve just been pretending to use my left hand my entire life because I enjoy never being able to work scissors properly.
I assumed I would be better off telling you about this, rather than waiting for the entire thing to blow up in my face.
Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts!
The dog looked up in entreaty. Liquid brown eyes begged: Take me with you. I’ll be good. Oh, the lies that dogs told.
If I had married, there is much I would not have learned of myself. This has been hard and painful and horrible. But I’ve learned that I’m stronger than hard, better than pain, and that with enough luck, horrible can go away.
Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?’His father did look up at that. ‘I didn’t raise another man’s son,’ he said sharply. ‘I raised my own.
When someone falls,” Mark said, “you don’t throw her back down in the dirt. You offer her a hand up. It’s the Christian thing to do.
Let them say what they wish behind your back. You need only be strong enough that they don’t say it to your face.