Sarah Perry Quotes & Sayings

CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up. — Sarah Perry

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

anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time — Sarah Perry

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? — Sarah Perry

We think we know where we're aiming, and perhaps we do - but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should've been trying in a different direction after all. — Sarah Perry

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

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. — Sarah Perry

Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world — Sarah Perry

Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life. — Sarah Perry

He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out. — Sarah Perry

If a reasoned creator set the stars in their place then we must be capable of understanding them - we must also be creatures of reason, of order! — Sarah Perry

It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage. — Sarah Perry

Must we make battlegrounds out of our children? — Sarah Perry

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his: children of the earth lost in wonder. — Sarah Perry

he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away. — Sarah Perry

Isn't it odd, how strangers come over the threshold and you never know what they might become... — Sarah Perry

The fear of the crowd then came to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgement, but that they were not, and could never be. — Sarah Perry

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. — Sarah Perry

I believe for most of us - for me, certainly - what's below the skin is more worth looking at than what's outside it. Turn me inside out and I'd be quite a handsome man! — Sarah Perry

to live at all is to be bruised — Sarah Perry

She'd never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she'd come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats. — Sarah Perry

in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement - you see the difference? — Sarah Perry

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 — Sarah Perry