Sarah Dunant > Quotes

“There have been none like us before. And there will be none afterwards. Be careful what you write.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty

“The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“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, The Birth of Venus

“Missing rubs the soul raw.”
― Sarah Dunant, Mapping The Edge

“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, In the Company of the Courtesan

“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

“Family. The greatest loyalty after God in the world.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty

“One enemy at the time.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty

“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, Blood & Beauty

“So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“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, Blood & Beauty

“If you love a man for his honesty, you cannot become angry when he shows it.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“There is more glory in peace than in war,”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty

“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, Mapping the Edge

“Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It is a wonder there is any room for poetry.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Name of the Family

“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, The Birth of Venus

“She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.”
― Sarah Dunant, Sacred Hearts

“Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty

“Either you’re standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“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, In the Company of the Courtesan

“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, Blood & Beauty

“It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woodshed. A monk jumped from a window. He sank into a drift and took a long time to get up. That night, they made me sleep next to the stove. I was small, thin, like a piece of birch bark. But then the Stove went out.
Father Bernard took me into his cell... It was he who first gave me chalk and paper. He was so old his eyes his eyes looked as if he was crying. But he was never sad. In winter he had fewer blankets than the others. He said he didn't need them because God warmed him.
(...)
But even Father Bernard was cold that night. He laid me down on the bed next to him, wrapped me in an animal skin, then in his own arms. He told me stories about Jesus. How His love could wake the dead and how with Him in one's heart one could heat the world... When I woke it was light. The snow had stopped. I was warm. But he was cold. I gave him the skin but his body was stiff. I didn't know what to do. I got out a piece of paper from his chest under the bed and drew him, lying there. His face had a smile on it. I knew that God had been there when he died. That now He was in me, and because of Father Bernard I would be warm forever.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“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, In the Company of the Courtesan

“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.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“Either you’re standing under your haloes, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which one they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“Death was, after all, a temporary staging post in a longer journey”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“in the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“As the last chimes die away, a series of contorted male shrieks rise up from somewhere nearby; a late coupling between the sheets or a few early knife thrusts into a belly? He smiles. Such are the sounds of his beloved city, the sounds indeed of the whole of Italy.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Name of the Family

“Johannes Burchard. The only man in Rome whose face remains the same be it perfume or shit under his nose.”
― Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty