Sarah Perry Quotes

...in rooms in Camden and Woolwich time was cruel to lovers wondering how it got so late so soon, and in due course was kind to their ordinary wounds.

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his: children of the earth lost in wonder.

He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it; spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

If a reasoned creator set the stars in their place then we must be capable of understanding them - we must also be creatures of reason, of order!

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.

Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.

Cora, you cannot always keep yourself away from things that hurt you. We all wish we could, but we cannot: to live at all is to be bruised.

Besides(..), it's a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved.

My thoughts are so tangled they'll take a mile or more to unravel.

Don't write. Don't come. I don't need it. It's not why I've written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility - I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself. It's the most that I can give and cannot be enough.

You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.

he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away.

Let me tell you: where the knife failed, you have succeeded. He is shattered - you have turned out all his lights! You have broken all his windows.

No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled.

What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sub-let, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten.

There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he'd been by the end, he'd formed her, at least in part - and what good ever came of self-loathing?

But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets. I want those stories, I want those secrets.

Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world

And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don't see me - I look out and see beauty and think I take part in it then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it...and I'll never tell him, even though I don't want anything in return, because what's really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.

Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that...

in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement - you see the difference?

Each considers the other to have a fatal flaw in their philosophy which ought by rights to exclude a friendship, and are a little baffled to discover it does nothing of the kind.

On the streets you'll stay, and your children, and it'll be no more than you deserve. We are punishing poverty," she said, pushing away her plate: "If you are poor, and miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there's precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty.

He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind but mistrusts the shifting sands of man's ingenuity.

We've loved each other so long I've never been a man and not loved her.

CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.

what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no mire fixed than the wind

The fear of the crowd then came to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgement, but that they were not, and could never be.

I said I'd go alone, but perhaps that's the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.

Grace," he said suddenly. "On Sunday I'll talk about the quality of grace, which I suppose is a gift of a kind---of goodness and mercy undeserved, and unexpected."
"That'll do for your sermon," she said. "That's quite enough. Let them go home early and walk in the forest, and find God there.

We are cleaved together - we are cleaved apart - everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.