The Birth of Venus Quotes

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Death was, after all, a temporary staging post in a longer journey”
― 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

“Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“I had wanted to talk to my mother like this for so long. To meet her woman to woman, as someone who had walked the same road before me, even if she had not passed through exactly the same places.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“such volumes of philosophy had the air of old men about them: venerable but having lost the energy to influence a world that had moved on from them.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“Children brought up in the company of adults learn better than most the power of solitude.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“The light shifts around the dais to the scratching of the chalk on the page, each line careful, considered, the result of a singular communion between the eye and the hand.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“you draw"
(the painter)”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“The safest opposition is one that doesn’t exist until the right moment.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“As long as I was both my own master and apprentice I would be forever caught in the web of inexperience.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“I am like Icarus without wings. But the desire to fly was very strong in me. I think I was always looking for a Daedalus.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus