The Silkworm Keeper Quotes

“o monachate. Marriage or the cloister, meaning women were either marriageable, and of value, or not. She’d wager there were more women in convents than fish in the sea. And far more nunneries than monasteries. So many women, and all of them forced to look up to Mary as their guiding star. And yet look at Mary’s life – a celebration of the fecund female; the Nativity, the Madonna and Child, and finally the Lamentation over her dead son, all experiences no nun could ever share. Nuns were to be denied all these states of womanly grace.”
― Deborah Swift, The Silkworm Keeper

“I’m sure you agree that the dowry for a Bride of Christ himself should be no less than for a secular marriage,’ Sister Simona said, ‘however aristocratic the groom.’ There was nothing Signor Moreno could say to that; many a man had stumbled”
― Deborah Swift, The Silkworm Keeper

“If we take her’ – Sister Simona stressed the if – ‘then our usual terms are a hundred and twenty silver scudi, plus the clothing donora, the dowry to be paid in full before admission.”
― Deborah Swift, The Silkworm Keeper

“He was to be married again, he told her, now his first wife had passed from the white fever.”
― Deborah Swift, The Silkworm Keeper

“Providence, she thought. The Lord sees our need and provides.”
― Deborah Swift, The Silkworm Keeper