Anne Perry Quotes

He stopped. He could see in her face that she had not
even thought of that sort of love. The very idea of a consuming sexual
passion which culminated in murder was something that had not
occurred to her with regard to herself and the general.

A good book changes you,even if it is only to add a little to the furniture of your mind. It will make you laugh and perhaps cry; it should certainly make you think.

Sometimes we bring to a struggle or cause the gifts we see most clearly, a courage, a strength, or a charm others have told us we have. But often we find more is asked of us than that, more than we intended or thought we possessed. We are asked to offer that which we thought dearest, to forgive what seemed unpardonable, to face what we feared the most and endure it. Sometimes we have to travel to the last step a path that was not of our own choosing. But I promise you this ... it will lead to a greater joy in the end. The difficulty is that the end is beyond our sight, it is a matter of faith, not of knowledge.

He was happy for other people's success.

You can like people and still betray them, if it was for a cause you believed in passionately enough. You have to betray other people rather than betray yourself
if that's what it comes to.

Love is brave and generous and above all it springs from honor. In order to love someone else, you must first be true to yourself.
Love is not two people wanting or needing what the other can give.
Hester Latterly

The sun was barely above the trees and any moment it would disappear. There was a golden haze in the air and it was appreciably colder than even a few minutes before. A cloud of starlings wheeled above a distant stand of poplars, still bare, although in the next garden a willow trailed weeping branches like streamers of pale chiffon. The breeze was so slight it did not even stir them.

I don't expect answers from anyone. The most I ever hope for is that here and there one may find someone who at least acknowledges the question!

In working with the wounded at Gallipoli, the lead character comments, Perhaps life was the nightmare and death the awakening.

Fear does different things to people. Some run away. Some go forward to meet it before it's there.

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out
anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

Anger at injustice has righted more wrongs than most other things, and it is one of the great creative forces in a civilized society.

The next few days passed in the customary fashion of Society during the Season. In the mornings they rode in the park, at which Emily had taught herself to be both graceful and skilled.

What's always right?" "Kindness," Pitt answered with certainty. "Keeping your promises. Not giving up just because it gets hard. Owning up to your mistakes, and not blaming other people even if you would get away with it.

Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.

An enormous gleaming grand piano stood in the center, its legs decently masked.

We believe world peace is inevitable.

ruins." A flush spread up

She was wearing a gown of lilac pink threaded with silver and stitched with tiny pearls. It was gorgeous in itself, and of course had the perfect new skirt, but it did not flatter her as a cooler shade would have done.

Nothing invites imitation like apparent success. The

there are none as virtuous as those who have never been asked.

You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.

Everyone depended upon the goodwill of others, on their skills or their patronage, their friendship or their protection. It was only that some forms of dependence were more obvious than others, not any more real.

He received in essence the same answer from every other shop he tried. No one recognized his description of Hester, and none of them had sold digitalis to any member of the Farraline household, or indeed to anyone not known to them personally. He pursued the other sources of information, the public house, the street peddlers and crossing sweepers, the errand and delivery boys and the news vendors, but all he learned was very general gossip that seemed to serve no purpose.

She understood very clearly why people go mad. Sometimes it is the only way to survive the unbearable when all other flight has been cut off. When the body cannot remove itself and emotions cannot be deadened, then the mind simply refuses to accept reality.

I would doubt that virtue, to her, means abstinence. It is far more likely to mean courage, compassion, and the integrity to be brutally honest, first with yourself and then with others, and never to run away just because you are exhausted or afraid.

Oi didn't loike that bloke, Captain. Bastard, 'e were, but Oi s'pose rules is for them yer don't loike. Yer won't 'urt them as yer do. In't that what God's about, been fair to them as rubs your coat all the wrong way?

She was dressed in the softest grape blue, a gentle color neither navy nor purple, nor yet silver. It was subtle, expensive and extremely flattering.

There were parts of Monk she admired greatly: his courage; his strength of will; his intelligence; his loyalty to his beliefs; his passion for justice; his ability to face almost any kind of truth, no matter how dreadful; and the fact that he was never, ever, a hypocrite.

I was born in London, England, in 1938, a few months before the war, and spent the first years of my life there, although I was evacuated a couple of times for short periods. My schooling was very interrupted, both by frequent moves and by ill health.

There is a fear of immorality and disease in our midst. We don't like to be reminded of such things so close to home. We feel guilty that it happens while we are perfectly well and comfortable ourselves. Africa is too far away to be our fault.

I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?

She dressed carefully in her favorite shade: pale green, more delicate than the earliest leaves, known as "waters of the Nile," or in the far more sophisticated French "eau de Nil." It was the softest silk, floating when she moved, and the sheen of it caught the light. Naturally it was the latest cut: soft at the shoulder and neck, smooth and slender at the hip. Pearls might have been more appropriate considering the name of the color, but she wore diamonds. She wanted the fire and the sparkle.

To take for granted one's blessings is a damage to the soul, and in time one will lose them, simply from lack of care. One should never tire of nourishing and treasuring all that is lovely.

And she was attractive. She had an unusual mixture of innocence and individuality. A man who loved her might waken all kinds of passions in her, and high among them would be loyalty.

Life is frightening," Claudine corrected her. "And beautiful and full of strange and unexpected opportunities. This is one of them.

Love also means the freedom to follow your own conscience. If you can't be true to yourself, you don't have much left to give anyone else.

We all try to forget what hurts us, it is sometimes the only way we can continue.

Disillusion in an ache that eats into the dreams of goodness, of love, of any value that matters - even to the very belief in life.

We'll hardly be in a position to discover much if they know you are married to a policeman!" she pointed out. "Let alone the very policeman who is investigating the murders. Added to which, it will do no harm for the general to see you as still unmarried.

She had never been beautiful- she had known that from the start- but she would like to have been loved, above all things. She would have to settle for being liked, perhaps for being trusted, respected. Best of all would have been to have had the courage to stand up for herself and fight for what she believed in.

Dai Tregarron had called her Olwen, had spoken to her as if she were a creature capable of escape from the commonplace, not the pedestrian, middle-aged woman everyone else saw, incapable of imagination, even less of passion. He had seen who she wanted to be and given the dream a moment's life.

Friendship was at the core of every relationship that mattered--allies, parent and child, lovers. On its foundation could be built all the other palaces of the heart.

A good library can provide the furniture of our minds and the threads from which we weave our dreams.

The time will come when we ourselves are disliked or misunderstood, or strangers, different from our judges in race or class or creed, and if their sense of justice depends upon their passion rather than their morality, who is to speak for us then, or defend our right to the truth?

I daresay in a way he deserved it, Joseph agreed with reluctance. But which of us can afford what we deserve? I need better, don't you?

And every moment one expects the sky to fling a barrage from clouds so leaden they hang low across the city roofs and drown the horizon.

What is the use of knowing everything, if you never actually practise it? They are forever cooking and never eating

Without the discipline of work, they had invented the discipline of etiquette, and it had become just as ruthless a master.

To lose someone you love because they die is a sweet ache. To lose everything good you believed of them is a pain that stains all they left behind. It poisons the very air of memory. Ballinger

The mountains are so beautiful they make me ache inside because the moment I look away I know I shall need to see them again. And I cannot spend the rest of my life standing on the spot starting at shifting sunlight and mist and shadows across the sea.

People only tell lies when the truth is disagreeable to them, or frightens them, or to cover sin.

When you are in love, there is not much that hurts as deeply as rejection.

Death from hunger happened a hundred yards from death from obesity.

Here in England there's a glass wall between you and the taste of reality. I don't want to see the last true passion tamed by railways, and men with Bibles telling everyone to cover their bodies." He spread his powerful, elegant hands. "Play your string quintets, by all means, Mr. Narraway, but don't silence the drums simply because you don't understand them. The men who play violins have steel and gunpowder, and the men who play drums don't.

He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.

But experience had taught her that such arguments failed. You cannot tell people to take into account what they do not wish to know. She

Isn't it a lovely ball?" She looked around at the sea of lace and tulle and silk, the blaze of lights, the laughter and the music and the sway and swirl of movement. "I wish everyone could be as happy as I am.

If we can still surmount what is natural and believe what we wish to believe, in spite of the force of evidence, then for a while at least we are masters of our fate, and we can paint the world we want.

Time was a peculiarly elastic measurement. It was an empty space, given meaning only by what it contained, and afterwards distorted in memory.

Embroidering the account, and decided it offered

Page 134 Florence Nightengale is speaking to William Monk
Of course. If you know the truth, it takes a gentler and perhaps a wiser woman than Purdence Barrymore not to speak it aloud. She did not understand the arts of diplomacy. I fear that perhaps I do not either. The sick cannot wait for flattery and coercion to do their work.

nonsenses to them that reminded her of

His face crumpled a little. It was highly expressive, mirroring his thoughts and feelings more than he wished.

She hated the streak of cruelty she knew in him, the arrogance, the frequent insensitivity. And he was a fool where judgment of character was concerned. He could no more read a woman's wiles than a dog could read Spanish! He was consistently attracted to the very last sort of woman who could ever make him happy.

The very power of evil is that it is not recognizable to us most of the time. It is not repellent at all. It does not attack, it seduces.

Who knows the colors someone else sees?

In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.

Christ to Satan, we are cut from the same cloth, every one of us. And we have the choice to be in eternity anything we wish. Man or woman. Genius or idiot, and all between. Physical beauty means nothing. God sees the heart. Wealth is only a test of what we would do with it. It is a loan from God, as are our talents, a way to prove whether we will use them well or ill. The judgment is awaiting us.

How have we behaved toward the poor, the lonely, the slow of word or wit?" Nazario demanded. "Have we patronized or condescended to the meek? Have we taken advantage? When you bullied your wife, when you condescended to your servant, when you insulted your employee, did you see Christ in their place? Would you have done the same to Him? Of course you wouldn't. Neither would I! Do I always trust people as I would were I to remember that God sees what I do? Of course not! But I should!

Hester, recently married herself, and knowing the depth and the sweep of love, ached for Callandra that she sacrificed so much. And yet loving her husband as she did, for all his faults and vulnerabilities, Hester, too, would rather have been alone than accept anyone else.

That was the worst truth of all: alone. The word was a kind of death.

A man should be proud of his heritage - not arrogant, as if it made him superior, but happy to own it and live up to the best in its promise. Monk

The room was one of her favorites, decorated entirely in dark green and white, with white doors and window embrasures, directing one's eye toward the light. The furniture was warm, dark rosewood, upholstered in cream brocade, and there was a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the table.

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond.

Had not the outrageous flair of Sybilla, and since George was a natural horseman it seemed almost inevitable that they should more often than not end up side by side, at some distance from the others. William never came, preferring to work at his painting, which was his profession as well as his vocation. He was gifted to the degree that his works were admired by academicians and collected by connoisseurs. Only Eustace affected to find it displeasing that his only son preferred to retire alone to the studio arranged for him in the conservatory and make use of the morning light, rather than parade on horseback for the fashionable world to admire. When they did not ride, they drove in the carriage, went shopping, paid calls upon their more intimate friends, or visited art galleries and exhibitions.

Friendship eased the heart and the mind, but there were times when the touch of arms around you healed an ache within that nothing else reached.

Perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.

Some academic pursuit had been a suggestion; she found study absorbing, but the tutorial positions open to women were few, and the restrictions of the life did not appeal to her. She read for pleasure.

Monk had a brief vision of what it must be like to be a women on her own, obliged to work at pleasing people because your acceptance, perhaps even your financial survival, depended upon it. There must be hundreds - thousands - of petty accommodations, suppressions of your own beliefs and opinions because they would not be what someone else wished to hear. What a constant humiliation, like a burning blister on the heel which hurt with every step.

And on the other hand, what a desperate loneliness for a man if he ever realized he was alway being told not what she really thought or felt but what she believed he wanted to hear. Would he then ever trust anything as real, or of value?

Perhaps it is because my conviction is anyone may believe whatever they wish. Intolerance is a greater offense against God than holding a strange or even inconsistent belief. You have the right to worship what you wish - a pile of stones in your garden - as long as you do not injure others.

choosing a gown of a dark blue-gray so soft that in the shadow it looked almost indigo. The line of the neck and the sweep of the skirt were both very flattering, and cut in the fashion of the moment. Deliberately she wore no jewelry, except very small diamond drop earrings. Her shining silver hair was ornament enough.

The men who cannot laugh at themselves frighten me even more than those who laugh at everything.

When we are happy to turn from evil because it is ugly, and causes us distress, then we condone it and become party to its continuance. Little by little, we become as guilty of it as those who commit the act - because we have told them by our silence that it is acceptable.

Runcorn was second fiddle, never first, but he had played the more beautiful tune.

Charlotte felt a pity for her, because her world was changing, and she did not understand it; it had no place for her. She was like one of Mr. Darwin's dinosaurs, dangerous and ridiculous, beyond its time.

The traffic was heavy, carriages, cabs, wagons, carts of every description passing by, splashing the water out of the gutters, wheels hissing on the wet road, horses dripping, sodden hides dark. Drivers sat hunched with collars up and hats down in a futile attempt to keep the cold rain from running down their necks, hands clenched on the reins.

How quickly a moment sinks into the past.

It was his own soul he was exploring, the one territory from which there was no escape, the one enemy which must always be faced, sooner or later, more certain than anything else in life or death.

She chose a very pale teal, halfway between blue and green, with a white silk fichu at the neck.

I am not. I am certain of the things that matter. Kindness and honor are always good. Do not build God in your own image, with your doubts and fears, your need to judge and condemn, your need for safety, and to be right whatever the cost to others, and ultimately to yourself. Let your soul be still, and know that God is never capricious, never cruel and never wrong. It is our understanding that stumbles. Even the cleverest of us are yet children, and the wisest of us know that.

All the fear in the world is not going to change anything, only rob me of what little I have.

He was perfectly capable of looking after himself, although after his marriage he had lost the knack for it. He missed the comfort of all the small things Charlotte did for him,but these were nothing compared to the loneliness. There was no one to talk to, with whom to share his feelings, to laugh, or to simply speak of the day.
And he missed the sound of the children's voices, giggling, their running footsteps, their incessant questions and demands for his attention or approval. No one interrupted to say "Look at me, Papa" or "What is this for?" or "What does this mean?" or the favorite "Why?" Peace was not peace anymore, it was simply silence.

Was a great enemy as much a part of a man's life as a great friend? Surely it must be. It must be the cross thread in the fabric of emotions.

That not what love is - an enlargement of the best and a healing over of the worst?