24 Sharon Kay Penman Quotes

Sharon Kay Penman quotes

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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!

5. 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.'

6. Joanna: 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.

7. Joanna: 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.

8. '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.

1. 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.

2. Men are born to sinWhat 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.

3. In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

4. My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

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

6. I was actually born in New York City, but my family moved to Atlantic City when I was five, this being my dad's home town, so I think that qualifies me as a Jersey resident if not a bona fide native.

7. I certainly know all about the Jersey jokes that amuse the rest of the country. You've probably heard them. Our state bird is the mosquito. Our state tree is dead. It doesn't help that we are represented on television by Tony Soprano and 'Jersey Shore.'

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

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

10. There is nothing worse than an enemy with imagination.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. Why is it honesty when a man speaks his mind and madness when a woman does?

14. Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

15. Richard, might I ask you something? We've talked tonight of what you must do, of what you can do, of what you ought to do.But we've said nothing of what you want to do.Richard, do you want to be King?" At first, she thought he wasn't going to answer her. But as she studied his face, she saw he was turning her question over in his mind, seeking to answer it as honestly as he could. "Yes," he said at last. "Yes...I do.

16. I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.