Ellis Peters Quotes

To have faith in Divine protection is good, but even beter if backed by the pratical assistance heaven has a right to expect from sensible mortals.

The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.

The saint is a good Welshwoman, and knows her countrymen. We are not quick in respect to rank or riches, we do not doff and bow and scrape when any man flaunts himself before us. We are blunt and familiar even in praise. What we value we value in the heart, and

Even a saint may take pleasure, in retrospect, in having been once desired

Cleverness and wisdom are not inevitable yoke-fellows.

There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful.

Once, I remember, Father Abbot said that our purpose is justice, and with God lies the privilege of mercy. But even God, when he intends mercy, needs tools to his hand.

So, wonder! I also wonder about you," said Cadfael mildly. "Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?

What are wits for unless a man uses them?

There is the matter of the girl, niece and heiress to the dead man. She is of great beauty," said Cadfael plainly, asserting his right to recognise and celebrate even the beauty of women, though their enjoyment he had now voluntarily forsworn,

Brother Cadfael knew better than to be in a hurry, where souls were concerned. There was plenty of elbow-room in eternity.

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!

It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.

Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it. - Pg. 254

I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire.

God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.

If ever you do go back, what is it you want of Evesham?"
"Do I know? [ ... ] The silence, it might be ... or the stillness. To have no more running to do ... to have arrived, and have no more need to run. The appetite changes. Now I think it would be a beautiful thing to be still.

You may whisper a word or two to God on my behalf at Matins and Lauds, if you'll be so kind. If he turns a deaf ear to you, small use the rest of us wearing out our knee-bones.

I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.

the good sense to fortify himself with the things of the flesh for the struggles of the spirit.

In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.

The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight.

I think there are some who live on a knife-edge in the soul, and at times are driven to hurl themselves into the air, at the mercy of heaven or he'll which way to fall.

Every man has within him only one life and one nature ... It behooves a man to look within himself and turn to the best dedication possible those endowments he has from his Maker. You do no wrong in questioning what once you held to be right for you, if now it has come to seem wrong. Put away all thought of being bound. We do not want you bound. No one who is not free can give freely.

Now have ado with a man!

I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.

God sort all! As doubtless he is doing, now as ever!

You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.

So Rhun had arrived at the last frontier of belief, and fallen, or emerged, or soared into the region where the soul realises that pain is of no account, that to be within the secret of God is more than well being, and past the power of the tongue to utter. To embrace the decree of pain is to translate it, to shed it like a rain of blessing on others who have not yet understood.

Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.

They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.

If none of us ever fell short, or put a foot astray, everything would be good in this great world, but we stumble and fall, every one. We must deal with what we have. - Cadfael, Pg. 245-6

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

There is no one who cannot be hated, against whatever odds. Nor anyone who cannot be loved, against all reason.

A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there's no escape from either.

And are you thinking, Hugh, what I am thinking?

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,

Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith. (Br. Cadfael)

Only I am sure I met no one on the way, because if I had I should have had to master myself, walk like a woman in her senses, even give a greeting. And when you have to, you can.

Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.

I value devotion and fidelity, and doubt if it matters whether the object falls short. What you do and what you are is what matters. Your loyalty is as sacred as mine.

In every decision there must be some regrets.

It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.

Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.

Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out.

Nothing learned is ever quite wasted.

The trouble with me, he thought unhappily, is that I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form we expect and demand.

Official justice does not dig deep, but regards what comes readily to the surface, and draws conclusions accordingly.

Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.

Murder is murder,as much a curse to the slayer as to the slain, and cannot be a matter of indifference, whoever the dead may be.

The success of a holiday depends on what you find for yourself on the spot, not what you bring with you.

One man alone can give up and subside into the cold and die, far more easily than two together, who will both brace and provoke each other, wrangle and support, give each other warmth and challenge each other's endurance. (The Virgin in the Ice, p. 87 of 200)

The mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.

The best way to get the sweet out of children and escape the bitter is to have them by proxy.

I do believe I begin to grasp the nature of miracles! For would it be a miracle, if there was any reason for it? Miracles have nothing to do with reason. Miracles contradict reason, they strike clean across mere human deserts, and deliver and save where they will. If they made sense, they would not be miracles.

Traffic with the world is laid upon us for chastening, and for the testing of our vocation. The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.

Too much trust is folly, in an imperfect world.

Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all.

Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.

Men drunk with ambition and power do not ground their weapons, nor stop to recognise the fellow-humanity of those they are about to slay. - Pg. 2

You'll never get to be a saint if you deny the bit of the devil in you.

There is no profit in ifs. We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil, and leave to God our good.

Where there is no certainty the mind must turn to the light and not the shadow.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.