Edith Pargeter > Quotes

“A dead eagle he might have buried, but he had chosen rather to light a fire for a phoenix.”
― Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

“Well, do as you think best. That's every man's right and duty. But for me, I pledge you now I will not surrender one grain of my rights. What I took, I took and by God, I'll keep it, too. Take her home tomorrow, Archie, and never look back to watch what I do, for you know it before. I would not give him one knigh who had confided himself to me and none other, much less you. Only over my dead body," said Hotspur hardily, eye to eye with the friend he had made under Homildon Hill, "will King Henry ever claim you as his prisoner.”
― Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

“What is there," Owain wondered aloud, to the sky above him and the soil below, "persuades this man still that my words do not mean what they seem to mean in sane men's ears?”
― Edith Pargeter

“Learn humility, while there's yet time--': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“There's nothing in this world within arm's-length of possibility that can not be done, when a man must.”
― Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

“The habit of questioning everything can be dangerous, for sooner or later it will surely bring a man into head-on collision with the unquestionable, and he will not be able in conscience to draw aside.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree

“The dispensations of God are always just,' he said. 'We get the sons we deserve.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.”
― Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

“It seemed to him that something which had always contained and confined him was broken, that he was loosed from it for ever; but whether he came forth into freedom or exile was something he could not determine.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree

“Should I come to you, Father, with anything that made me ashamed? What do I matter? What's honour to me? My honour is to keep her from harm and from grief. I have no other; I want none.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“Love with her would be a field of action, not a need. She was complete whether she won or lost the world. She was her own fortress and her own sanctuary.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“This new approach, it seemed, was not to be made so publicly, not to be exposed to the expedient treason of little devious minds far removed from the battlefields on which honest men met, and contended, and killed one another without malice.”
― Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

“He could not be a breaker, it was against his bent.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?”
― Edith Pargeter, The Green Branch

“Do you think you're the only one groping? We're all in the dark together. Wait until God please to clear the sky.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Scarlet Seed

“He knew exactly what he wanted, he had been working over it in his mind for some seven years now... he had yet to see how much ground he had to use, but neither beauty nor splendor have need of great size. What he wanted was light, light and space, and the upward surge of stone like a growing tree from foundations to vault. No oppression, no darkness, no burden of thick, groaning columns and lowering roofs like the stony weight of guilt. He saw the shape clearly. No chevet of chapels, but a square east end, so that he could have a whole wall of invading light pouring in upon the high altar. Short, strong transepts, lofty aisles, and the clerestory tall and fully glazed above a shallow triforium. The west front with a great, deeply-cut doorway and a vast window above, set back in course on course of moulding, where the light could harp all day long on strings of stone, making even that greyer northern air shine lucid and sharp as the dazzling south. Over the west front two minor turrets, tapering to slender fingers of stone. Over the crossing the great tower, as in Normandy, binding all together, rooting all impregnably into the earth, drawing all erect with it towards heaven. In that tension was the significance of life, and next to light, this he wanted above all, the duality of flesh and spirit, manhood and godhead, the tension of man on his way to God. A noble tower, tall and tapered, its long surfaces so subtly fluted and molded that light and shadow might stroke it into a hundred changing shapes of majesty and beauty as the hours of the daylight passed. Permanence and change, diversity and oneness, in that grey-gold stone that glowed in his memory like - what was Adam's phrase?- a mine of sunshine. There is no growth nor fruitfulness but rises from these paired opposites of darkness and light, earth and heaven. My feet as roots in the earth, my forehead straining into the sun. The tower at once anchoring my church fast to the rock, and translating it into a balanced arrow of light aimed at the sky.

There is no beauty where there is doubt or insecurity. A sense of unbalance is the death of art.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree

“Have you no errand I can do for you in hell?' he said. 'There's cleaner company there.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree Trilogy: The Heaven Tree / The Green Branch / The Scarlet Seed

“If you cannot imagine pain fully, neither can you fully imagine the resources you have in you to meet it and overcome it.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Heaven Tree

“for no border severs man from man, or one manner of living totally from another.”
― Edith Pargeter, The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet