Sharon Kay Penman Quotes

“Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.”

“I inhale hope with every breath I take.”

“… A scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival…(Here be Dragons)”

“I should like to freeze in time all those I do love… Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!”

“There is nothing worse than an enemy with imagination.”

“Joanna (Lady of Wales): Mama… why do I not look like you? Why do I have hair black like a crow?
Clemence: Because you take after him. That was all I asked of God, that I need not see him each time I looked into your face. Little enough to ask, I should think. But we do pay and pay for our sins, it seems, and you grow more like him with each day that passes.”

“We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?”

“Eleanor: I'm tired, John, am asking you to keep this charade mercifully brief… for my sake if not for your own.
John: For your sake? There was a time when I'd have done anything on God's Earth for you, just to get to acknowledge I was even alive! But now? You're too late, Mother, years too late!”

“Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.”

“Men are born to sin…What does matter most, is not that we err, it is that we do benefit from our mistakes, that we are capable of sincere repentance, of genuine contrition.”

“John: If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.”

“In the year of Christ 1183, the House of Plantagenet was at war against itself.”

“Servant: My lord! My lord, the Queen has just ridden into the bailey!
John: That cannot be! My mother is in Normandy.
Servant: No, my lord, she's in the great hall.
Eleanor: You both are wrong. I'm out in the stairwell.”

“You're proving to be a merciless ghost, Papa. I should have expected it, knowing you as I do, Joanna said. Her tears were coming faster now. "What do you mean to do, Papa? Shall you haunt me for the rest of my days?" Her voice broke; kneeling on the icy tiles before John's coffin, she wept bitterly.”

“Joanna (Queen of Sicily): Richard's arrival at Messina was a godsend, in truth, and I will ever be grateful to him. Yet I do not doubt you'd have done as much for me too, Johnny. So would our brother Henry. Even Geoffrey, provided it did not inconvenience him unduly. Any one of you would have come to my aid, I know that. and yet none of you would ever have come to the aid of each other.”