Quotes from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“I inhale hope with every breath I take.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“For every wound, the ointment of time.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“…a cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed...”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“It was just like him, she thought; with him, a happy ending was always a foregone conclusion. But such was the power of his faith that when she was with him; she found herself believing in happy endings, too.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“Why is it honesty when a man speaks his mind and madness when a woman does?”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“...Life without sinning was like food without salt, pure but tasteless.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“In time of war, the Devil makes more room in Hell.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“It was a basic tenet of faith with men of Ranulf’s class that a knight, trained in the ways of war since boyhood, could easily vanquish lesser foes, as much a belief in the superiority of blood and breeding as in the benefits of battle lore and killing competence. Ranulf had accepted this comforting conviction, too, but no one seemed to have told his assailants that they were inferior adversaries.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“When people want to insult a man, they cast slurs upon his courage. But the worst they can say about a woman is to impugn her chastity.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“You might as well face it. You're not going to be able to fight for the crown. You'll just have to grit your teeth and let us hand it over to you at the bargaining table.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“I know you do not care much for such revelries, but trust me—this one you will enjoy, Harry. You and I will sit at the high table, eating porpoise and swan, whilst we watch my male kinfolk eating humble pie!”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“More than men had died at Lincoln. It seemed to Stephen that reality was a casualty, too, for nothing made sense anymore. What was he doing here in the solar of Lincoln Castle, bleeding all over the Earl of Chester’s wife?”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“He'd never seen one so vibrant, though, or so vividly compelling... those glowing green eyes sparkling with sunlight and curiosity and silent laughter, and when she glanced in Henry's direction, she held his gaze, a look that was both challenging and enigmatic... He was utterly certain that this was Eleanor of Aquitaine, and no less sure that the French King must be one of God's greatest fools.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“You asked what the Londoners wanted of you, and he…he said ‘ballocks.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“They had gathered at Eastcheap to wait. At this time of day, the marketplace ought to have been thronged with people looking for bargains, moving from stall to stall, examining the fresh fish, choosing the plumpest hens, buying candles and pepper and needles. The stalls were open, but the fishmongers and cordwainers and butchers were doing no business, despite the growing crowd. The sun was hot, flies were thick, and the odors pungent; no one complained, though. They talked and gossiped among themselves, strangers soon becoming friends, for the normally fractious and outspoken Londoners had forgotten their differences, at least for a day, united in a common purpose and determined to revel in their triumph, for they were pragmatic enough to understand this might be their only one. Now they joked and swapped rumors and waited with uncommon patience, and at last they heard a cry, swiftly picked up and echoed across the marketplace: “She is coming!”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“In the past few months, life had lost its sweetness and he’d lost his way. But no longer. Death was once again the enemy, his indifference and apathy drowned in a Cheshire pond.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“She wanted to order him clapped in irons, as he so deserved. But she was stopped by what she saw in the faces of the watching men: disapproval, instinctive and involuntary, but disapproval, nonetheless. They were not comfortable when power was wielded by a woman, not at a man’s expense, a man who had just acquitted himself so spectacularly at Lincoln, winning their reluctant respect in a way she knew she never could.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“Now our poor Gib never had a sense of humor to lose...”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

“Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice,too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears... or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad." Geoffrey's mouth twitched. "God help me," he said, "I've sired a lawyer!”
― Sharon Kay Penman, quote from When Christ and His Saints Slept

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Popular quotes

“[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

“On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death

“The years were falling over like ducks in a shooting gallery, and it seemed to Mr. Bridge that he had scarcely taken aim at one when it disappeared.”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge

“The more that science unravels about the wonder of life and the universe, the more i am in are of it. the beauty and wonder of the universe and all that surrounds us offers proof of God. I like that idea”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding

“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

Interesting books

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