Sharon Kay Penman quotes

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)

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

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

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

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

I inhale hope with every breath I take.

Sharon Kay Penman

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

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

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

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

Sharon Kay Penman

There is nothing worse than an enemy with imagination. (Sharon Kay Penman)

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.

Sharon Kay Penman

For every wound, the ointment of time.

Sharon Kay Penman

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

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

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 scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival...(Here be Dragons)

Sharon Kay Penman

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.'

Sharon Kay Penman

Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey.

Sharon Kay Penman

Women did not have as many options as men, and I need to reflect that reality in my mysteries.

Sharon Kay Penman

I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author. (Sharon Kay Penman)

I should like to freeze in time all those I do love... Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!

Sharon Kay Penman

I do not set specific work hours as some writers do. I generally stay with a chapter until I am satisfied, do very little rewriting, and if a scene is going well, I've been known to keep night owl hours.

Sharon Kay Penman