Sarah Perry Quotes

#1. He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.

Sarah Perry

#2. 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.

Sarah Perry

#3. anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time

Sarah Perry

#4. Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?

Sarah Perry

#5. 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.

Sarah Perry

#6. Isn't it odd, how strangers come over the threshold and you never know what they might become...

Sarah Perry

#7. 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

Sarah Perry

#8. to live at all is to be bruised

Sarah Perry

#9. I believe for most of us - for me, certainly - what's below the skin is more worth looking at than what's outside it. Turn me inside out and I'd be quite a handsome man!

Sarah Perry

#10. Luke diagnosed himself to be in love, and sought no cure for the disease.

Sarah Perry

#11. 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!

Sarah Perry

#12. Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world

Sarah Perry

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

Sarah Perry

#14. 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.

Sarah Perry

#15. We think we know where we're aiming, and perhaps we do - but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should've been trying in a different direction after all.

Sarah Perry

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

Sarah Perry

#17. 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.

Sarah Perry

#18. Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.

Sarah Perry

#19. 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?

Sarah Perry

#20. 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.

Sarah Perry

#21. It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.

Sarah Perry

#22. She'd never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she'd come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats.

Sarah Perry