Sharon Kay Penman Quotes.
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.
It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.
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.
In time of war, the Devil makes more room in Hell.
When does he ever think?” Richard straddled a chair and accepted a wind cup from Raoul. “If he were to sell his brain, he could claim it had never been used.”, Chapter 7
Abigail Adams could become my favorite historical sleuth.
A cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed.
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.
During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil’s own accomplices.
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.
When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research ‘Here Be Dragons,’ I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.
…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.
For every wound, the ointment of time.
I’d just rather not reap a crop every year.
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.
Why is it honesty when a man speaks his mind and madness when a woman does?
Forget the threat of Hell’s infernal flames. The true torture would condemn a man to wait and wait and wait – for an eternity
It was just like him, she thought; with him, a happy ending was always a foregone conclusion. But such was the power of his faith that when she was with him; she found herself believing in happy endings, too.
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.
Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.
Women did not have as many options as men, and I need to reflect that reality in my mysteries.
I should like to freeze in time all those I do love, keep them somehow safe from the ravages of the passing years…”Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!
