Sarah Dunant Quotes & Sayings

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(the painter) — Sarah Dunant

I know what she is thinking. That she will never have those feelings. And she wants to have them. Oh, how much she wants to ... I have seen it before, the way women yearn more for a child when they have fallen in love. It is part of the disease, like the ague that goes with fever. Maybe the real lover's prick goes deep enough to ignite some loning in the womb. Maybe it is the promise of a future, something left over once the passion is spent. — Sarah Dunant

The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration. — Sarah Dunant

Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes. — Sarah Dunant

Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities. — Sarah Dunant

This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing the imperial ruins, their insistent teeth pulling weeds - and mortar - from between the stones of history. A city still struggling with a chasm of hardship between rich and poor, still ripped apart by gross family violence. But also a place of growing magnificence and confidence where, for the first time in centuries, the future no longer looks bleaker than the past, and where the new Pope has chosen for himself a name designed to foster a belief in magnificence again. Alexander — Sarah Dunant

Uncertainty is more contagious than the plague. Cesare, — Sarah Dunant

Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us. — Sarah Dunant

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth. — Sarah Dunant

He spends the night in prayer. God's voice, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, tells him what the politician in him already knows: that whatever he might stand to gain from playing one against the other, the prospect of a foreign army marching through Italy can bring only instability and devastation in its wake for all. He is, it seems, the Church's shepherd after all. — Sarah Dunant

She has never liked sleeping alone. Even as a small child, she would steel herself to brave the black soup of the room as far as her brother's bed, creeping in beside him. And he, who when awake would rather fight than talk, would put his arms around her and stroke her hair until their warmness mingled and she fell asleep. — Sarah Dunant

Why I thought, must there always be two conversations? one that women have when there are men present & one we have when we are alone? — Sarah Dunant

Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister. Now, when [Pedro Calderon] shuts his eyes, he cannot see anything else. — Sarah Dunant

Venice the peaceful demands Venice the just. — Sarah Dunant

And, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me. — Sarah Dunant

In the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat. — Sarah Dunant

It is the ones who keep you in thrall to more than their snatches who command the houses and the gowns to go with them. And for that they have first to love themselves. — Sarah Dunant

Outside, the city is changing. While we have been talking of God's laws and seacrets of the earth, a cold fog has come rolling off the sea, pushing through the allys, sliding over the water, rubbing up agienst the cold stone. As I walk the street falls away behind me, the shop's blue awning lost within seconds. People move like ghosts, their voices disconnected from their bodies; as fast as they loom up they dissapear agien. The fog is so dense that by the time I have crossed toward the Merceria, I can barely see the ground under my feet or tell if the gloom is weather of the beginning of dusk. — Sarah Dunant

There is more glory in peace than in war, — Sarah Dunant

No one bothered dressing up in priests' robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn't rich enough. — Sarah Dunant

So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy. — Sarah Dunant

A voice yelled after me but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone's nightmare. — Sarah Dunant

But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least. — Sarah Dunant

God always seeth man from heaven and the angels report to Him every hour. — Sarah Dunant

Missing rubs the soul raw. — Sarah Dunant

If you love a man for his honesty, you cannot become angry when he shows it. — Sarah Dunant

She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them. — Sarah Dunant

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands. — Sarah Dunant

Family. The greatest loyalty after God in the world. — Sarah Dunant

One enemy at the time. — Sarah Dunant

Beauty is your gift from God and it should be used and not squandered. Study this face as if it were a map of the ocean, your own trade route to the Indies. For it will bring you its own fortune. But always believe what the glass tells you. Because while others will try to flatter you, it has no reason to lie. — Sarah Dunant

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all. — Sarah Dunant

There have been none like us before. And there will be none afterwards. Be careful what you write. — Sarah Dunant

Ambassadors, of course, do not blush. It is a requisite of the job that they can sustain any manner of insult without any visible change at all to their face. — Sarah Dunant

Johannes Burchard. The only man in Rome whose face remains the same be it perfume or shit under his nose. — Sarah Dunant

If grace belongs to God, there are those who say that luck belongs to the Devil and that he looks after his own. — Sarah Dunant

What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power. — Sarah Dunant