Top 60 Anne Perry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People lie to cover their mistakes, and then make even worse ones to cover their lies.”

— Anne Perry

2. “People only tell lies when the truth is disagreeable to them, or frightens them, or to cover sin.”

— Anne Perry

3. “The very power of evil is that it is not recognizable to us most of the time. It is not repellent at all. It does not attack, it seduces.”

— Anne Perry

4. “What do I believe? It has been a long journey of discovery. There have been hesitations and errors along the way, and no doubt will be more, because I am still learning, both about myself and about life.”

— Anne Perry

5. “We believe world peace is inevitable.”

— Anne Perry

6. “The truth can be very sharp. But it makes a cleaner wound than lies. It will not fester.”

— Anne Perry

7. “A good library can provide the furniture of our minds and the threads from which we weave our dreams.”

— Anne Perry

8. “The men who cannot laugh at themselves frighten me even more than those who laugh at everything.”

— Anne Perry

9. “When we are happy to turn from evil because it is ugly, and causes us distress, then we condone it and become party to its continuance. Little by little, we become as guilty of it as those who commit the act – because we have told them by our silence that it is acceptable.”

— Anne Perry

10. “I think it’s a terrible thing to write and not enjoy it. It’s a sad thing. But of course a lot of people do work because they need to eat. And we all need to eat, but that’s not the only reason to work. You couldn’t have paid me not to write.”

— Anne Perry

11. “We all try to forget what hurts us, it is sometimes the only way we can continue.”

— Anne Perry

12. “I was born in London, England, in 1938, a few months before the war, and spent the first years of my life there, although I was evacuated a couple of times for short periods. My schooling was very interrupted, both by frequent moves and by ill health.”

— Anne Perry

13. “The mountains are so beautiful they make me ache inside because the moment I look away I know I shall need to see them again. And I cannot spend the rest of my life standing on the spot starting at shifting sunlight and mist and shadows across the sea.”

— Anne Perry

14. “Disillusion in an ache that eats into the dreams of goodness, of love, of any value that matters – even to the very belief in life.”

— Anne Perry

15. “Was a great enemy as much a part of a man’s life as a great friend? Surely it must be. It must be the cross thread in the fabric of emotions.”

— Anne Perry

16. “I believe in an individual soul which travels through eternity. This life is far from all there is – in fact, it is a minute part, simply an antechamber, a deciding place where we choose the light from the dark, where we come to know what we truly value.”

— Anne Perry

17. “Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can’t buy it. You can’t buy class.”

— Anne Perry

18. “You deliberately don’t ask the questions to which you would rather not know the answers. You call it trust. You know too late that it is cowardice.”

— Anne Perry

19. “If you drive a man to choose between death of his body or corruption of his soul, how much are you also to blame if his choice is the wrong one?”

— Anne Perry

20. “Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.”

— Anne Perry

21. “Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be. There will be a great many things you can achieve not by attacking them but with a little patience and a modicum of flattery. Stop to consider what it is you really want, rather than pursuing your anger or your vanity to charge in. So often we leap to passionate judgments – when if we but knew the one thing more, they would be so different.”

— Anne Perry

22. “What a waste of the essence of a man that he should never give enough of himself to any cause, that he should always hear that passive, cowardly voice uppermost which counts the cost and puts caution first. One would grow old and die with the power of one’s soul untasted.”

— Anne Perry

23. “Before you pity yourself, take a great deal closer look at others, and then decide with who you would or could change places and what sacrifice of your nature you would be prepared to make in order to do so.”

— Anne Perry

24. “You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.”

— Anne Perry

25. “But easy victories pall after a while. If one always wins, perhaps one is attempting only what is well within one’s capabilities – and there lies a kind of death, don’t you think? That which does not grow may well be showing the first signs of atrophy.”

— Anne Perry

26. “Without the discipline of work, they had invented the discipline of etiquette, and it had become just as ruthless a master.”

— Anne Perry

27. “He remained silent because silence was the only space large enough to hold it without crushing or bruising the heart of it.”

— Anne Perry

28. “Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are.”

— Anne Perry

29. “To take for granted one’s blessings is a damage to the soul, and in time one will lose them, simply from lack of care. One should never tire of nourishing and treasuring all that is lovely.”

— Anne Perry

30. “Perhaps it is because my conviction is anyone may believe whatever they wish. Intolerance is a greater offense against God than holding a strange or even inconsistent belief. You have the right to worship what you wish – a pile of stones in your garden – as long as you do not injure others.”

— Anne Perry

31. “I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?”

— Anne Perry

32. “I did a complete rewrite of 650 pages in two weeks.”

— Anne Perry

33. “The great question, is there anything at all which is worth fighting such a war about, with the devastating loss it will bring? I believe yes, there are some freedoms which to sacrifice would be EVEN worse.”

— Anne Perry

34. “God! I hate clever women!” She froze for an instant before the reply was on her lips. “I love clever men!” Her eyes raked him up and down. “It seems we are both to be disappointed.”

— Anne Perry

35. “Here in England there’s a glass wall between you and the taste of reality. I don’t want to see the last true passion tamed by railways, and men with Bibles telling everyone to cover their bodies.” He spread his powerful, elegant hands. “Play your string quintets, by all means, Mr. Narraway, but don’t silence the drums simply because you don’t understand them. The men who play violins have steel and gunpowder, and the men who play drums don’t.”

— Anne Perry

36. “Friendship eased the heart and the mind, but there were times when the touch of arms around you healed an ache within that nothing else reached.”

— Anne Perry

37. “The trees in the small copses of wood were just beginning to turn color. The chestnuts like liquid amber deepening here and there; willows still trailed streamers of green. The wild roses in the hedges were long finished, and they showed bunches of orange hips where flowers had been.”

— Anne Perry

38. “Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say ‘If I were you, I would do this, or that.’ ‘I’ am never ‘you’ – and my solutions may not be yours.”

— Anne Perry

39. “Who cares whether the heroine wins if there wasn’t any battle?”

— Anne Perry

40. “There were parts of Monk she admired greatly: his courage; his strength of will; his intelligence; his loyalty to his beliefs; his passion for justice; his ability to face almost any kind of truth, no matter how dreadful; and the fact that he was never, ever, a hypocrite.”

— Anne Perry

41. “Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be.”

— Anne Perry

42. “In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.”

— Anne Perry

43. “I am now working on the second WWI story and find the challenge marvelous.”

— Anne Perry

44. “We need our marks, our small illusions; few of us can bear to go naked into the world’s gaze. And people will kill to keep their clothes.”

— Anne Perry

45. “Your own gown is most delicately suitable, both to the occasion and to yourself,′ to be translated: Your gown is insipid and entirely forgettable. If you wear it on every other occasion this entire season, no one will notice or care.”

— Anne Perry

46. “Her happiness swept the house in a whirlwind; her misery wrapped it in a purple gloom.”

— Anne Perry

47. “Everything between sunset and darkness. There is so much room for imagination. You see things in a different way from the glare of daylight. There’s a richer beauty, and an awareness of how fleeting it all is, how ephemeral.”

— Anne Perry

48. “I’m so sorry, my dear,” she said quietly. “It’s a shock, even though he was old. Pieces of our lives being chipped away reminds us of our own fragility, and how precious life is.”

— Anne Perry

49. “What was humility unless one possessed the courage to admit error, ignorance and futility, the strength to go back and begin again?”

— Anne Perry

50. “What’s always right?” “Kindness,” Pitt answered with certainty. “Keeping your promises. Not giving up just because it gets hard. Owning up to your mistakes, and not blaming other people even if you would get away with it.”

— Anne Perry