In the Company of the Courtesan Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“for once life is comfortable, there is nothing to fear, nothing to fight for. Which means in turn that there is nothing to look forward to.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“It is the ones who keep you in thrall to more than their snatches who command the houses and the gowns to go with them. And for that they have first to love themselves.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“no one bothered dressing up in priests’ robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn’t rich enough.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“How would it be if the end was not Heaven or Hell but just an absence of life? My God, I swear that would be Heaven enough for most of us.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“I have heard about Venice’s fogs from my old man at the well, dark stories of how the mist descends as thick as doubt, so that men can no longer tell where the land ends and the water begins. The next morning, he says, you can always find one or two fellows with bad consciences floating facedown in a canal barely a hundred yards from their homes.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“If there were not so many rules to hinder them, I think that men would look at women all the time. Once there is food enough in one’s stomach, what else is there to do in life? You see it every day with women in the market or on the streets: the way men’s eyes fix on them, like iron snapping onto a magnet, scooping their breasts out of their bodices, lifting petticoats and parting shifts, savoring thighs and bellies, burrowing into the beard that hides the moist little pleat beneath. Whatever”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“fire consumes more than it warms. In the end there will be only ashes,”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“I know what she is thinking. That she will never have those feelings. And she wants to have them. Oh, how much she wants to...I have seen it before, the way women yearn more for a child when they have fallen in love. It is part of the disease, like the ague that goes with fever. Maybe the real lover's prick goes deep enough to ignite some loning in the womb. Maybe it is the promise of a future, something left over once the passion is spent.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“Venice the peaceful demands Venice the just.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan

“beauty is your gift from God and it should be used and not squandered. Study this face as if it were a map of the ocean, your own trade route to the Indies. For it will bring you its own fortune. But always believe what the glass tells you. Because while others will try to flatter you, it has no reason to lie.”
― Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan