Beth Underdown > Quotes

“... resentment buried is not gone. It is like burying a seed: for a season it may stay hidden in the dark, but in the end, it will always grow.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“These last months, I have learned that the acknowledged history that belongs to the daylight, that is not the only history. Turn over the stone and you will find another history, wriggling to escape.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“My brother buried his resentment that day. But resentment buried is not gone. It is like burying a seed: for a season it may stay hidden in the dark, but in the end, it will always grow. I did not see it, though we were still close, even at that age. I think now that to be close to someone can be to underestimate them. Grow too close, and you do not see what they are capable of; or you do not see it in time.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“We cannot help but give weight to last words, to endings, as though they carry some greater truth than all the other words a person has spoken and written since they learned to write, learned to speak.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“I will lay it out in black and white, and my tale will contain more truth than the great dead histories on my father's bookshelves. For they say what happened, but not what it was like. They say what happened, but they do not say why.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“I think now that to be close to someone can be to underestimate them. Grow too close, and you do not see what they are capable of; or you do not see it in time.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“For it is a choice, I think, to close the heart, just as it is a choice to open it. It is a choice to look at what distresses you, and a choice to shut your eyes. It is a choice to hold tight your pain, or else let it slip your grasp, set it free to make its mark upon the world.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“Remembering how Father had said to me once that the most fearful thing you could meet down a dark lane was another person. But it is not so, I thought, as we rode towards the Thorn: what you meet in the dark is yourself. And that is truly a thing to be feared.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“watch time do twice the work of any beating,”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“For it is a choice, I think, to close the heart, just as it is a choice to open it. It is a choice to look at what distresses you, and a choice to shut your eyes. It is a choice to hold tight your pain, or to let it slip your grasp, set it free to make its mark upon the world.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“For certain, evil does touch our mortal lives from time to time, but not, I am given now to think, in such a way as can be explained. Not, perhaps, in such a way as it is possible to know who to blame.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“They did not see how it was the thinnest of tricks: if a thing frightens you, call it something else. They did not see that to classify a thing away from fearfulness rather shows fear, than any lack of it.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“A witch is supposed to be a kind of idolator, though my brother, to my knowledge, has never proposed stoning. For who could have the appetite for that? Pitted head wounds, crushing, the spreading of black blood trapped under the skin. But perhaps folk had stronger stomachs back then. The ones who wrote the Bible down. Perhaps their land was dusty and poor, and trees too rare for the building of scaffolds. Perhaps all they had were stones, and the light work that many hands make.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“My brother buried his resentment that day. But resentment buried is not gone. It is like burying a seed: for a season it may stay hidden in the dark, but in the end, it will always grow”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“Grief did not quieten the world's demands, and I was thankful to be kept busy.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“The number of women my brother Matthew killed, as far as I can reckon it, is one hundred and six. He accomplished it in two of our short English summers, and the months between. One hundred and six women, through Essex, Suffolk and beyond: that much is certain.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“I had always wanted to read the books that Father said were too hard for me, not realizing yet that understanding a book is not the same as being able to spell out all the words.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“Lying bed, I listened to them, and I wonder now where in truth the real power rested that night: whether in the hands of men like Grimston, men like Edwards. Whether it slept with the King at Oxford in an ordinary bed, dormant, like a taint in the blood. Whether it rested on the waiting benches of the Commons, or whether it went home with their plain occupants, like a shilling in each of their pockets.

I think the truth is that, rather than resting in any one of several places, all real power had gone loose by that night through the realm; and the land might have belonged to any man. Any man with the will to say, 'This is what we shall do.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister