Meredith Duran > Quotes

“He smiled. "How kind of you to confirm what I already know. Perhaps next you will introduce me to myself. I hear I am quite popular.”
― Meredith Duran, Bound by Your Touch

“I deserve better —such a dangerous, mad thought for a woman to entertain.”
― Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure

“Words are not the only way we communicate, you and I. They never were.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“There. That is the answer to this riddle. The promises I can make, and the one I can't. Gwen. I will never leave you willingly. Life is a risk, and so love is, as well. But I swear to God, you will not regret the gamble.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“I trust only you and the dark always to look at me so honestly.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“With so many willing, complex women in the world, he had little respect for men who fixated on girlishness. Innocence was, by definition, an absence of experience—character—knowledge. To desire that absence seemed rather deviant.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“I've heard that sarcasm is no substitute for cleverness”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!”
― Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure

“You are...beyond my imagination. It's a wonder you can be touched at all.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“Manners, you see, come down to a single principle: talk of nothing that might actually prove interesting.”
― Meredith Duran, A Lady's Lesson in Scandal

“She did not feel anything so boring as beautiful. She felt fierce.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“In love my temperament found a new taste for life: it found a cure for the pain, and a pain without cure.'" –Ghalib”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“He see's the world the way cynics do; Not looking for false Hope.”
― Meredith Duran, A Lady's Lesson in Scandal

“Some people were like that; they could not escape criticism, because they never quite managed to convince themselves of the role everyone believed they should fill.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“I'm here," he said into her ear, as the tears came faster. "Emma, I'm here with you now. Listen to me: I will always be here."Always, she thought. He said "always," but he had forgotten to say finally. Finally you are here. Thank God, finally at last.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“Yours if you want it."

- Julian to Emma.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“When he entered after her, she saw that he meant to come straight to her, and she raised a hand. "No," she said. "Wait."

His footsteps halted. He had always listened to her, hadn't he? Had always heard her."

-Emma and Julian”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“He smiled at her: he simply couldn't help himself. He was so glad she'd wandered into his house to kill him.”
― Meredith Duran, A Lady's Lesson in Scandal

“Sarcasm might be the lowest form of humor, but certainly it was also the most satisfying.”
― Meredith Duran, Fool Me Twice

“She wished he could make her somehow indelibly his; that they were still children so they could cut their fingers and mingle their blood and know this meant something. She longed for some transformation more lasting than that wrought by the law and his name, some visceral change he might effect in her so that anyone on the street with one glance would know she was his.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“Now, when he sat at the piano, he did not play music for the company the notes provided him. He played the music so she might hear it, and come a little closer to him as she listened.”
― Meredith Duran, A Lady's Lesson in Scandal

“His smile faded a little, growing softer, more intimate, like the look he'd showed her in bed this morning. 'You haven't learned yet when to lie.' Slowly, as if the words were being dragged from him, he added: 'I confess, Nell, I hope you never learn.' She found herself staring at him. Unsteadying thought: there was something hot in his eyes that wasn't purely want. It was too tender, too ... affectionate.”
― Meredith Duran, A Lady's Lesson in Scandal

“Spoken often enough, words become [became] nonsense.”
― Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure

“Modesty, if you consider it, is the most unforgivable sort of falsehood: it's a lie that does damage to no one but yourself.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“I admit, that the brain does not govern the body as well as one might wish- else all men would be saints and hell would be empty of lechers.”
― Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure

“and I said, 'That is why you don't climb mountains, Gwen.' But now I wonder. You aren't afraid of heights."

"No", she said. "Not particularly."

"Only missteps."

She paused midstroke. Did he mean to imply this had been a misstep? "I was afraid," she said carefully. "For a very long time. But no longer."

"So was I," he said, and lifted her chin and kissed her.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“He knew himself well enough to know his own faults. Impatient and judgmental and stubborn and often too quick to act: he would try never to crush her, never to overwhelm her or bend her to his will, but if she did not demand only the best from him, it would happen. It might happen. Possibly.”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“—that if she touched him right now, their flesh would recognize each other. The wildest thought: these scars, his and hers, would speak to each other, communicating intimacies that could not be unshared.”
― Meredith Duran, Written on Your Skin

“On a breath, he leaned forward. It was such a small space to close. Such an infinite distance to cross.”
― Meredith Duran, The Duke of Shadows

“And he wondered, suddenly, what sort of divide it created between them, that he knew pieces of her that she had never shared with him - facts and stories and moments and memories to which she had no idea he was privy. He had collected them for so long, denying to himself that this acquisition was anything more than casual amusement, when in fact it was zealous, and jelaous besides; diwowning as accidental the fact that he never forgot a single remark she made, or that others made about her, and that he approved of these other people, or disdained them, according to their treatment of her. Such a lopsided intimacy existed between him and her. Inevitably, it created a chasm whose depth neither of them could know until they tried to chart it. Would this chasm prove impossible to bridge?”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You