Sharon Kay Penman Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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.

Sharon Kay Penman
I'd not want to answer for the lives of other men; not at seventeen, by God's Grace.

Sharon Kay Penman
Why is it honesty when a man speaks his mind and madness when a woman does?

Sharon Kay Penman
Forget the threat of Hell's infernal flames. The true torture would condemn a man to wait and wait and wait - for an eternity

Sharon Kay Penman
How fragile life was, how fleeting their days on earth, and how fickle was Death, claiming the young as often as the old, the healthy as often as the ailing, cruelly stealing away a baby's first breath, a mother's fading heartbeat.

Sharon Kay Penman
During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil's own accomplices.

Sharon Kay Penman
I'll admit that my garden now grows hope in lavish profusion, leaving little room for anything else. I suppose it has squeezed out more practical plants like caution and common sense. Still, though, hope does not flourish in every garden, and I feel thankful it has taken root in mine.

Sharon Kay Penman
Eleanor: It is a pretty fiction that mothers love each child in equal measure... a fiction, no more than that. There is always a favorite. With me, it was Richard. With Henry, it was you.
John: No. I was not his favorite. It was rather that I was the only son he had left. Have you forgotten? My brothers sided with you.'

Sharon Kay Penman
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?

Sharon Kay Penman
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.

Sharon Kay Penman
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.

Sharon Kay Penman
In the year of Christ 1183, the House of Plantagenet was at war against itself.

Sharon Kay Penman
…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

Sharon Kay Penman
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.

Sharon Kay Penman
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.

Sharon Kay Penman
…a cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed...

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

Sharon Kay Penman
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!

Sharon Kay Penman