Best 51 quotes of Courtney Milan on MyQuotes

If it must be done, it's best done bravely.

If people did not fear me so, how could anyone tolerate me?

Libraries are the future of reading.

Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow's book buyers for today's dollars, especially when it's obvious that the source in question doesn't have any more dollars to give you.

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.

Of course; a nurse wouldn't have been quite so bold in her speech. Not to a duke's heir. Not even to a wealthy tradesman who held the power of her employment in his too-large hands.

When someone else's safety and acceptance in society is on the line, your personal discomfort comes in a very distant second.

You see, I'm not some shiny bauble to be strung onto a necklace and displayed for all the world to see. I'm too proud to ever be anyone's conquest.

After everything we’ve done for each other, a few harsh words hardly signify.

But none of that matters. When I see you, I remember that you made me want to drown rather than be myself.

Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts!

Do you want to know why you don't meet my standards?" he asked. She shook her head in mortification. "Too late," he replied. "Here's my most important rule: Never have intercourse when one of the parties is in love with the other. It won't end well." She gasped. "You arrogant cad! I'm not in love with you." "I know." He didn't look away from her. "Isn't that what I said? Only one of us is in love, and it isn't you." Violet stared at him. Her ears appeared to be working; her brain seemed to function. Tentatively, she added two and three and verified that they still made five.

Edward had the odd notion that after years of drab motionlessness, his entire world had suddenly begun to spin about him. He’d had that feeling ever since he’d been pulled into her orbit on the bank of the Thames. She gave him the most astonishing vertigo. He should have hated it. But he didn’t—not one bit.

Friendship was a concept men bandied about to save face when they were rejected.

...having you as a friend wasn’t second prize. It wasn’t something to chafe against. It was an honor.

He knew that 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 live" and he hoped.

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.

Hers. Hers. She belonged to herself again, body and soul, pleasure and heartbreak. She was every inch hers again, her body reclaimed from those long years of bitter ownership. She was hers.

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.

I adhere to the law of chastity because I don’t believe in pushing women. That’s what it means to be a man. I don’t hurt others simply to make myself feel superior. Gossip can ruin a woman as surely as unchaste behavior. True men don’t indulge in either. We don’t need to.

I do believe you would have cut the rope.

I’d tell you to fetch a match, but you have always had your own spark.

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.

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.

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.

I had to outrun the person you all believed me to be.

I spent my day as I normally spend my days: threatening suppliers, bullying those who are not in line with my expectations, and generally creating havoc in the lives of others. The square across the street is empty of all but the pigeons. I find myself resenting them.

I keep everything hidden because there's nothing about my true self that anyone likes. I'm not difficult, Sebastian. I'm the easiest person around. I don't belong, and I spend all my time pretending I do. Sometimes I get weary of it, and that makes me angry. It's not fair to the people around me when I lose my temper. I say awful things when I'm angry. But it's not fair to me, either, that I was made this way.

I’m here to horrify you,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t bear it any longer, he reached out and pulled her to him. She was warm and soft in his arms, and she smelled so deliciously right. He could have inhaled her scent for hours. “Hugo—” He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t know who he was or what he wanted or what dreams would come to fill his heart. He only knew that if he couldn’t have her, nothing would ever be right again. And so he kissed her. He tasted her, sweet and steady against him, put his hand in the small of her back and drew her toward him. She kissed him back. “I love you,” he said. The truth took root inside him. For the first time in years, the dark words of his past receded. “But, Hugo…” He set his fingers over her lips. “Let me do this,” he said. “I thought I had to prove myself with money and accomplishments. But those will always ring hollow. They will never be enough. I want to be somebody. Let me be your husband. Let me be the father of your child—of all your children. I got more satisfaction from striking Clermont than I did from any success I found in business.” She pulled back from him. “You struck Clermont?” “Twice. And—that reminds me—I blackmailed him into promising to send your child to Eton.” Hugo tightened his grip around her. “I’ve never pretended to be a good man, you know. It’s just that…I’m yours.” He leaned his head against hers. Her breath was warm against his face. “Did you hit him hard?” “I’m afraid I did.” “That’s my Hugo.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice. “I love you, you know. If you hadn’t come, as soon as winter set in and the ground became too hard to work, I’d planned to come for you.” “Well, I’m glad I came to my senses,” Hugo said. “You shouldn’t have traveled, not in your condition. Yet curiosity impels me to inquire. What did you plan to do, once you arrived?” “Allow me to demonstrate.” She lifted her face to his, traced the line of his jaw with her fingers. “This.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And this.” She kissed the other corner. “And…” She took his mouth full on, her lips soft against his, tasting of all the things he’d most wanted. “I’d do that,” she whispered, “until you were forced to admit you loved me.” “I love you.” “Well, that’s no fun.” She kissed him again. “Now what excuse do I have?” He drew in a shuddering breath and pulled her closer. “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.

I'm not difficult," Violet said. "I'm simple. I like good books and clever conversation and being left alone much of the time. How does that make me difficult? I make sense? I don't talk about my feelings, of course, but then, I don't want to." She shrugged. "So that's reasonable." Sebastian smiled despite himself, a smile that felt bitter even to him. "God, no. Not feelings. Heaven forbid that you have anything so messy." "I have feelings." She spoke stiffly. "I just don't talk about them. What's the point? Talking never changes them.

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.

Ned: I figured it was time for a picnic by the menagerie. Jenny: And you brought me? Why not take the woman you're marrying? Ned: She's grown up with the Duke of Ware. Lions seem less ferocious.

Of all the things I wish for in this world, I want you to find happiness. I suspect you never will have that with me, and I've resigned myself to the matter.

She had always thought that she wanted someone to love her beyond all reason. Someone who would slay a regiment of knights to save her the slightest inconvenience. She'd been wrong. That sort of fool left nothing but a swath of bloody knights in his wake.

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.

Step one: stop feeling self-conscious about things not working. You want a PhD? Well, guess what. You’re going to be issued a wall, with instructions to beat your head against it for a few years. If you’re lucky, the wall will crack, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of walls. If you’re unlucky, your head will break, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of heads. Either way, we have to talk about failure. If you can’t get over your ego and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four times as long.

The dog looked up in entreaty. Liquid brown eyes begged: Take me with you. I’ll be good. Oh, the lies that dogs told.

The performance was exotic. It was short. And it wasn't much more dreadful than the Chinese opera that had been performed last year. "Bravo!" Ned called. He applauded madly. Thankfully, everyone joined in. Blakely bowed, rather stiffly, and picked his way through the rows toward his seat. He didn't even make eye contact with Ned, didn't acknowledge that Ned had just saved him. Ha, Just because Blakely had no humility didn't mean Ned couldn't try to humiliate him further. "Encore!" Ned shouted. Blakely fixed Ned with a look that promised eventual dismemberment. Luckily for the future attachment of Ned's limbs, nobody else took up the cry.

They want a woman who is a canvas, white and empty. Standing still, existing for no other purpose than to serve as a mute object onto which they can paint their own hopes and desires. They want their brides veiled. They want a demure, blank space they can fill with whatever they desire.” “Miss Lowell, you magnificent creature, I want you to paint your own canvas. I want you to unveil yourself.

This is why people are so hard to understand. I cannot even estimate their gravitational pull.

Three quarters of respectable England hates you." "Half," Sebastian replied with a smile. "It's really only half. Judging by my correspondence, it may be as little as forty-eight percent. And of those, only a small number want to cause me bodily harm. The rest just wish to have me gagged or thrown in prison.

We are married -and maybe this is no conventional arrangement, but it is still real. "It isn't," he said. "It is. What is a husband, but the man who offers you support when all the world turns you away?" Was that what he was to her? He couldn't look at her now, or she'd see how much those words affected him. She continued. "What is a wife, but a partner who will see through to your deepest wishes? We have promised each other our deepest wishes.

We're friends...And what that means is this: I won't let anyone hurt you. Not if I can stop it.

What can I say? I have a thing for women who carry heavy books and know how to use them

...what started with those simple requirements -- make her notice me, but guarantee that nobody understood how I felt -- turned into the cruelest thing I have ever done to another human.

What you did when you were young could kill you. It just might take years to do it.

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.

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.

You always put things at risk. If you fell out of a tree as a child, I'd clean you up and bandage your knees, and next I looked you'd be out climbing again. You never learned your lesson." Oh, she'd learned her lesson. Climb harder.

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.