The Crimson Petal and the White Quotes

“A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over.
‘One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,’ says Sugar. ‘It saves time and paper.’ Seeing that the child is unconvinced, she adds, ‘If books were written in such a way that every person, no matter how young, could understand everything in them, they would be enormously long books. Would you wish to read a book that was a thousand pages long, Sophie?’
Sophie answers without hesitation.
‘I would read a thousand million pages, Miss, if all the words were words I could understand.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour out implies that the man has some control over the matter, which he most emphatically doesn’t; leak is too feeble for the savagery of the injury she has inflicted upon him. Sugar closes her eyes and watches, in the lurid theatre of her mind, the blood issue from the slit neck. When Mrs Castaway’s warning bell sounds, she jerks in surprise.
Hastily, she scrutinises her bedroom. Everything is neat and tidy. All her papers are hidden away, except for this single sheet on her writing-desk.
Spew, she writes, having finally been given, by tardy Providence, the needful word.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): ‘It’s the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we’re still paying for them.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“...to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away...It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie’s formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“if she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one’s servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it’s not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham’s household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“William Rackham es lo que podríamos llamar un cristiano ateo supersticioso; es decir, cree en un Dios que si bien puede que ya no sea responsable de que salga el sol, de salvar a la reina o de proveer del pan de cada día, sigue siendo el principal sospechoso cuando algo va mal.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Drying herself with the hem of her shift, she notes that her two candles are dimming; one of them is already a guttering stub. Will she light new ones? Well, that depends on what time of night it is, and Caroline has no clock. Few people in Church Lane do. Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace. This is a street where people go to sleep not at a specific hour but when the gin takes effect, or when exhaustion will permit no further violence. This is a street where people wake when the opium in their babies’ sugar-water ceases to keep the little wretches under. This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats. This is a street reached only faintly, too faintly, by the bells of church and the trumpets of state.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet, she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“La curiosidad es el nombre despectivo que los hombres dan a la sed de conocimiento que tienen las mujeres.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White