Falls the Shadow Quotes

“Men kill for many reasons, they steal but for one-greed.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“He looked upon this verdant, blossoming spring, a spring Joanna would never see, he looked upon a field of brilliant blue flowers- the bluebells Joanna had so loved- and at that moment he'd willingly have bartered all his tomorrows for but one yesterday.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“His was a lonely, unorthodox conviction that war was man's ultimate failure.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Rumors are the easiest of all crops to tend, Richard. You need only sow a few seeds about and in no time at all, you’ll reap a harvest of hatred.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Henry did not lack for physical courage; his was a moral cowardice.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“What is a thing worth, if it comes with no risk?”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“for each age interprets the past in the light of its own biases.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“If, like the Romans, he must make a desert and call it peace, so be it.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“But in all honesty, I do not find it so peculiar a notion, that a Welshman should rule Wales.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Llewelyn smiled. “We have a saying amongst my people: Eilfam modryb dda; a good aunt is a second mother.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“You hair looks verily like spun gold," he said, and then laughed. "I sound like every smitten lover since the world was green. Why must the language of love be so threadbare? There ought to be a way to tell you how I feel without evoking so many echoes, so many ghosts.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Louis shook his head. "Those who dismiss women as the weaker sex," he said mildly, "have never met the Countess of Leicester.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“times”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“I asked Simon if he’d ever feared that all our struggles, all our suffering might be in vain. Not a priest’s question, and he shamed me by his answer, by the shining certainty of his faith. He said no, my lady, and then he told me of a cave he’d found whilst in the Holy Land. It was said to have magical powers; a man could shout and long after it had died away, it echoed back as if from the very bowels of the earth. Simon had so marveled at it that he’d never forgotten it. And that night in Hereford Castle, he said that whilst it might seem as if we were but shouting into the wind, our echoes, too, would come back in time, echoes to hearten the godly and haunt kings. He laughed then, but he believed it, my lady, and I found I believed, too.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“back all he’d been”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“An intimate enemy, death, capricious and cruel, ultimately invincible.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Troubles may ofttimes be so dire that they cannot get better. But they are never so dire that they still cannot get worse.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Edward Plantagenet is no man to hold cheaply. Far better to take him at his own inflated estimation!”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“You must try to understand, my dearest one. It was not treason, was but a dream bred before its time, that the King should not be accountable only to God. No mortal man ought to be entrusted with power such as that, for any king’s son may be born a fool.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Simon said nothing, thinking of all the good men who’d died because this inept, faithless fool had been born a King’s son.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“He was too astute a politician, too ambitious a Prince, to confuse friendship with statecraft.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“But such was her faith in Simon that it colored her faith in God; unable to conceive of defeat, she never doubted that the Lord, too, willed Simon to win, and falling asleep in Simon’s arms, she did not dread the morrow, so secure was she in the strength of her yesterdays.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“Mayhap not, but a king ought to be far-sighted enough to realize that if reforms are inevitable, better he be the one to carry them out.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“A man just realizing the fatal extent of his own folly was not likely to be all that rational.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“That may be infidel wisdom, but it is wisdom all the same.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“He could not change his nature, could not help being cautious, deliberate, introspective, not traits to be scorned by any means, but traits that seemed dull, bland—even to him—when compared with Davydd’s hell-for-leather dazzle.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow

“In my life, I've been both the besieged and the besieged, and I know damned well which I prefer!”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Falls the Shadow