The Choir Quotes

“Beneath her Marks and Spencer jersey, her heart sometimes called him darling, and after two glasses of Liebfraumilch, lover.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir

“Human kind had failed the Dean. He had meant to love his fellow man, had believed not only that he could, but that it would be easy because he wanted to, but he had found, to his dismay, that most of his fellow men simply were not loveable. Their deviousness he might have forgiven, their unscrupulousness and even cruelty, the world was after all a harsh place and drove a man to very basic behaviour merely to survive, but their oafish vulgarity, their unashamed preference for the crude and the shoddy fell little short of disgusting him.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir

“The Bishop was capable of anger, but he was not capable of hate.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir

“This is awful,” Sally said. “Why should it be so painful?” “Because you don’t realize how important your human landscape is until bits drop away.” He gripped her hand. “It’s worse when you get older. In your twenties, you never think—”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“It is not, Ianthe, a priest’s function to be a bottomless well of woolly uncritical forgiveness. That would only devalue virtue.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“Together we will ensure that for as long as we are alive to achieve it, the King’s School shall send its singing boys to the cathedral as it has done these four hundred years.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“If there is privilege in the subject of English choral music, it is ours, the listeners’. No boy is barred from this choir in Aldminster because he cannot pay the fees. But if we lose the choir, we not only damage our souls, our inner selves, call it what you will, but we also deprive the future both of something so precious and ancient it is not ours to destroy, and of something the future may long, quite justifiably, to preserve. What we lose in breaking a hitherto unbroken tradition we may never have again.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“Nicholas went to choral evensong on the Sunday, and could have wept. They sang part of a Tallis motet and he thought, If the time comes when nobody can hear this sound anymore, it will be the end.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“They both got tired in term time, up for daily rehearsals, in and out of the cathedral all week for extra practices, Saturday afternoons without fail, seven sung services a week, school, homework.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“There is no need to say anything when you pray,” the dean had heard Bishop Robert say at a recent confirmation in the city. “Just take time to look at God. And let Him look at you. That’s all.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir: A Novel

“Sometimes you plant an acorn, and you plant it in good faith and instead of finding yourself with an admirable sturdy single oak tree, you’re landed with a terrible mad forest that won’t stop growing in all directions and develops an uncontrollable life of its own.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir

“If I could only meet Sally in the silent reading room of the public library, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir

“Not having God with you is like trying to walk normally on one leg; it twists you, it must.”
― Joanna Trollope, The Choir