Best 18 quotes of Sarah Perry on MyQuotes

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

Did you really think you could carry on like that- you never wanted friends or lovers - you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants' revolt.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?

Oh, she had loved him – no-one could ever have loved more: she’d been too young to withstand it, a child intoxicated by an inch of drink. He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness. He had been so sombre that when attempts at levity made him laugh she’d felt an empress in command of an army; he was so stern, and so remote, that the first moment he embraced her had been a battle won. She’d not known then that these were the common tricks of a common trickster, to cede a skirmish and later lay her waste. In the years that followed, her fear of him was so very like her love – attended by the same fast-paced heart, the same broken nights, the same alertness to his footstep in the hall – that she was drunk on that, too. No other man had touched her, and so she could not tell how strange it was to be subject to pain as much as pleasure. No other man had loved her, and so she could not judge whether the sudden withdrawal of his approval was natural as the tide and as implacable.

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.

She’d prized Will’s affection because it was impossible that he might want her as Michael once had; his affection was bounded off on all sides by Stella, and his faith, and by what she’d gratefully thought was his complete failure to notice she was a woman. ‘I might as well be a head in a jar of formaldehyde, for all he cares,’ she’d once said to Martha: ‘It’s why he prefers to write to me than see me – I’m only a mind, not a body: I’m safe as a child – don’t you see how I might prefer it?’ And she believed it, too.

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?

They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by growing swiftly bad-tempered ('You don't understand!' 'How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?').

To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time - and so we try again.

Well then, he said. What are you doing here? I am not sure. Liberty I suppose. I lived so long under constraints. You wonder why I grub about in the mud - it's what I remember from childhood. Barely ever wearing shoes - picking gorse for cordial, watching the ponds boiling with frogs. And then there was Michael, and he was - civilised. He would pave over every bit of woodland, have every sparrow mounted on a plinth. And he had me mounted on a plinth. My waist pinched, my hair burned into curls, the colour on my face painted out, then painted in again. And now I'm free to sink back into the earth if I like - to let myself grow over with moss and lichen. Perhaps you're appalled to think we are no higher than the animals, or at least, if we are, only one rung further up the ladder. But no, no - it has given me liberty. No other animal abides by rules - why then must we?

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.

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

Yesterday I walked to Clerkenwell in the morning and stood by the iron grate where the Fleet flows, and listened, and imagined I heard the waters of all the rivers I have known - the head of the Fleet at Hampstead where I played when I was young, and the wide Thames, and the Blackwater, with its secrets that were hardly worth keeping. Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and the shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, something joined. The sun on my back through the window is warm and I hear a chaffinch singing. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you.