Top 40 Sarah Penner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.”

— Sarah Penner

2. “The best apothecary was one who knows intimately the despair felt by her patient, whether in body or heart.”

— Sarah Penner

3. “Maybe I would have my head stuck in fairy tales, as James liked to joke, but wouldn’t that still be better than the nightmare in which I now found myself?”

— Sarah Penner

4. “It’s okay to change,” I interrupted, “but it’s not okay to hide, to bury parts of ourselves.”

— Sarah Penner

5. “If there was anything that the last few days had taught me, it was the importance of shining new light on old truths hidden in dark places.”

— Sarah Penner

6. “Healing by way of vengeance... no such thing existed; it never had. Hurting others had only injured me further.”

— Sarah Penner

7. “My mother had held tight to this principle, instilling in me from an early age the importance of providing a safe haven – a place of healing – females.”

— Sarah Penner

8. “Why did we suffer to keep secrets? Merely to protect ourselves, or to protect others?”

— Sarah Penner

9. “Heartache is shared by all, and favors no rank.”

— Sarah Penner

10. “The curse of magick, they believe, is that for every reward, there is a great loss. For every spell that goes right, there is something else – in the real, natural world – that goes terribly wrong.”

— Sarah Penner

11. “Eliza’s inquisitive spirit and youthful energy were salves upon my heart.”

— Sarah Penner

12. “Killing and secret-keeping had done this to me. It had begun to rot me from the inside out, and something inside meant to tear me open.”

— Sarah Penner

13. “If you want something different, the only person holding you back is you.”

— Sarah Penner

14. “My mother’s legacy embodied the brewing of potions to ease maladies, but it also meant preserving the memory of these women in the register – granting them their single, indelible mark on the world.”

— Sarah Penner

15. “For many of these women,” Nella whispered, “this may be the only place their names are recorded. The only place they will be remembered. It is a promise I made to my mother, to preserve the existence of these women whose names would otherwise be erased from history. The world is not kind to us... There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark.” I finished tracing an entry, moving on to the next one. “But this register preserves them – their names, their memories, their worth.”

— Sarah Penner

16. “Convention could burn, for all she cared.”

— Sarah Penner

17. “To me, the allure of history lay in the minutiae of life long ago, the untold secrets of ordinary people.”

— Sarah Penner

18. “As a student, I’d been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, those whose names weren’t acknowledged and recorded in textbooks. And now, I’d stumbled on the mystery of one of those nameless, forgotten people – and a woman, no less.”

— Sarah Penner

19. “I now stood at a crossroads, and I didn’t dare look back at the road behind me – the road littered with monotony, complacency and other people’s expectations.”

— Sarah Penner

20. “The unknown had once been an unpleasant concept to me, but I realized now the opportunity in it. The excitement in it.”

— Sarah Penner

21. “I suppose this made her even more admirable. Like a dog with a mouthful of sharp teeth who never once attacks, my mother’s knowledge was a weapon she never once used.”

— Sarah Penner

22. “Healing by way of vengeance.”

— Sarah Penner

23. “Beneath the ink strokes of my register held betrayal, anguish and... dark secrets.”

— Sarah Penner

24. “But I knew from writing Mrs. Amwell’s letters that the things a person most wanted to say were often the things they should keep tucked away inside.”

— Sarah Penner

25. “Men want to feel pursued, but still superior. They want to feel understood, but not exposed. They want control over you, but they want to believe you’re a fool, unaware of it.”

— Sarah Penner

26. “Everything placed unto the body removes something from it, calls it forth or represses it.”

— Sarah Penner

27. “The youthful, adventurous student in me had begun to resurface.”

— Sarah Penner

28. “You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”

— Sarah Penner

29. “This glass object – delicate and yet still intact, somewhat like myself – was proof that I could be brave, adventurous, and do hard things on my own.”

— Sarah Penner

30. “Why did we go to such lengths to protect the fragile minds of children? We only robbed them of the truth – and the chance to grow numb to it before it arrived with a hard knock on the door.”

— Sarah Penner

31. “Did he finally decide that life was too short to be miserable forty hours a week?”

— Sarah Penner

32. “Something cannot be an illusion if it still exists after we think it has gone.”

— Sarah Penner

33. “Intermingled in the mess was another, subtler secret... we were happy, yet unfulfilled. It was possible, I understood now, to be both at the same time.”

— Sarah Penner

34. “It is the most distressing thing, Eliza, to issue pain to someone, even when you know it is for the best.”

— Sarah Penner

35. “And why had it taken a life crisis to finally ask myself the question?”

— Sarah Penner

36. “First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust... what you have learned is the same heart-wrenching journey of every woman to whom I have sold a poison. And it is, indeed, the same path for me.”

— Sarah Penner

37. “Did everything reinvent itself over time? It was beginning to seem like every person, every place, carried an untold story with long-buried truths resting just beneath the surface.”

— Sarah Penner

38. “Because saving lives with the gifts of the earth, Eliza, is as good as magick.”

— Sarah Penner

39. “How had I only just learned that happiness and fulfillment were entirely distinct things?”

— Sarah Penner

40. “The hint is to let your subconscious find the anomaly. Our brains are meant to identify breaks in a pattern. We evolved that way, many millions of years ago. You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”

— Sarah Penner

41. “History might dismiss these women, but I would not.”

— Sarah Penner

42. “History doesn’t record the intricacies of women’s relationships with one another; they’re not to be uncovered.”

— Sarah Penner

43. “I could feel the change in myself at this very moment: the discontent within me seizing the possibility of adventure, an excursion into my long-lost enthusiasm for eras past.”

— Sarah Penner

44. “I was happy with the stability of working for my family, yet unfulfilled by my job and burdened by the things I hadn’t pursued.”

— Sarah Penner

45. “If felt as though the universe, in her strange and nonsensical way, meant to reach out to me, to remind me of the enthusiasm I once had for the trifling bits of bygone eras, if only I could look beneath the dirt that had accumulated over time.”

— Sarah Penner

46. “You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.”

— Sarah Penner

47. “This was precisely what I found so enchanting about history: centuries might separate me from whomever last held the vial, but we shared in the exact sensation of its cool glass between our fingers.”

— Sarah Penner