A Lady for a Duke

I would say"—he shaped the words close to her mouth, as if each of them was its own kiss, a private prayer—"I love you as a man loves a woman, but we both know that love is not bound by such narrow terms. So instead let me simply tell you that I love you. I love you with the unfading flame of my friendship. With every drop of ardour in my blood. I love you with my soul, as some reserve their faith for absent gods. I love you as I believe in what is right and hope for what is good. I love you with everything I am and ever was—and if you will only let me, with every day that comes, and every self that I could ever be.

I am not sure love unshown is really love at all. What good does caring for a person do if you're never there when they need you?

He wanted to look at her like he wanted to breathe, like she was breath and he was drowning, and every moment of his not looking was a struggle towards the thing he most needed. Except once he looked, looking would not be enough. Then he would have to talk to her—draw the delicate spool of her thoughts from that smiling mouth, until he knew all the colours of her. Until he understood how a stranger could seem so familiar to him. How something in her could call to a part of him he had long thought dead. How it was possible she could feel like homecoming to a man who had never before had any sense of home.

Sometimes it is the most vital thing in the world to be selfish...I don't see what use we can be to others if we must deny our own most fundamental selves. We all have the right to be recognized for who we are.

It was not a betrayal of me for you to do what you needed to save yourself.

Damn the world. The world told you that you had to live the life it shaped for you, and you defied it. The world told me that I had to be as my father was, and I defied it, or am trying to. We can make our own world, Viola, with our own rules.

The world teaches men to listen only to what they want to hear and women to tell it to them.

Please don't laugh, Miss Carroll. If you're laughing, you must be smiling, and I don't think I can climb back up to see it." [...] "My smile," she called out, "would not be worth such exertion." "You are quite wrong." "Even so, it is hardly an uncommon commodity." "That does not lessen its value.

As far as I’m concerned, depravity applies only to acts committed without consent or without care.

I don’t see what use we can be to others if we must deny our own most fundamental selves. We all have the right to be recognised for who we are.

I knew him better than my own soul. He may have been my soul, for what little I am worth without him.

I cannot meet him as a stranger. But he has never known me as myself.

Please don't leave me again," he whispered. "I think I could learn to live without you, but I have no wish to.

That I did not know how to see you,' he told her, 'is not your lie.

When I am with you, I feel about as far from anything that has ever hurt me as it is possible to be.

You are my joy and my truth and my heart and my dreams. You are the best of me.

Children are stronger than you think. Besides, they haven't had years and years of silly people filling their heads with silly ideas about what you're meant to do or say or be.

What we want and what we need and what we think is best aren't always the same.

Don’t try to tell me that time is a healer because time also kills people.

Small acts of defiance, he well knew, could become great acts of rebellion, and little intimacies could become alliances or passions that shaped lives and worlds.

So instead let me simply tell you that I love you. I love you with the unfading flame of my friendship. With every drop of ardour in my blood. I love you with my soul, as some reserve their faith for absent gods. I love you as I believe in what is right and hope for what is good. I love you with everything I am and ever was—and if you will only let me, with every day that comes, and every self that I could ever be.

A moment of clarity within the haze of convalescence: perhaps in death, I may find myself at last.

Her eyes flared like the deepest heart of a flame. “How dare you. I have never known it. And I will never believe it. Strength is not the capacity to hurt. Or the capacity to remain unhurt. It is…what we let ourselves feel. And how truly we love.

What a marvel it was. What freedom. To be a woman unabashedly in love beneath a multitude of stars.

That the world expects weakness from women is an inequity that we can sometimes twist to our favour.

Suffering isn’t something we earn, Gracewood. It’s something we bear.

In war we are all either meat or murderers.