Top 60 Sarah Perry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My thoughts are so tangled they’ll take a mile or more to unravel.”

— Sarah Perry

2. “Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges.”

— Sarah Perry

3. “You told me once you forget you are a woman, and I understand it now – you think to be a woman is to be weak – you think ours is a sisterhood of suffering! Perhaps so, but doesn’t it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.”

— Sarah Perry

4. “We’ve loved each other so long I’ve never been a man and not loved her.”

— Sarah Perry

5. “She’s the kind of woman who’s misunderstood: they think because she’s so pretty and wears her clothes so well, and because she gossips and chatters, that she’s nothing but a ballerina in a jewelry box turning round and round; but I knew from her first letter that she’d a sharpness to her – I don’t think she misses anything, not even now.”

— Sarah Perry

6. “The principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life.” – Every Cradle Is a Grave.”

— Sarah Perry

7. “The wonderful thing about being a widow is that, really, you’re not obliged to be much of a woman anymore –.”

— Sarah Perry

8. “Don’t write. Don’t come. I don’t need it. It’s not why I’ve written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility – I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself. It’s the most that I can give and cannot be enough.”

— Sarah Perry

9. “Cora, you cannot always keep yourself away from things that hurt you. We all wish we could, but we cannot: to live at all is to be bruised.”

— Sarah Perry

10. “Friendship is not crumbs – you’re not grubbing around for scraps while someone else takes the whole loaf. It’s all I’ve got to give. All right, once I might have had more – but for now, it’s all I’ve got.”

— Sarah Perry

11. “I think it possible to put flesh on the bones of our terrors, most of all when we have turned our back on God.”

— Sarah Perry

12. “Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.”

— Sarah Perry

13. “William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his: children of the earth lost in wonder.”

— Sarah Perry

14. “The windows in her room were open and light was fading on the wall. She said, ‘There may be blood,’ and he said, ‘Better that way – better’; and it was Cora’s mouth he kissed, and Cora’s hand she placed where she wanted it most. Each was only second best: they wore each other like hand-me-down coats.”

— Sarah Perry

15. “I have an ally, she thought: he will never let me go. Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret; because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather.”

— Sarah Perry

16. “Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.”

— Sarah Perry

17. “Luke diagnosed himself to be in love, and sought no cure for the disease.”

— Sarah Perry

18. “We are cleaved together – we are cleaved apart – everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.”

— Sarah Perry

19. “CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.”

— Sarah Perry

20. “It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.”

— Sarah Perry

21. “On the streets you’ll stay, and your children, and it’ll be no more than you deserve. We are punishing poverty,” she said, pushing away her plate: “If you are poor, and miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there’s precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty.”

— Sarah Perry

22. “And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don’t see me – I look out and see beauty and think I take part in it then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it... and I’ll never tell him, even though I don’t want anything in return, because what’s really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.”

— Sarah Perry

23. “Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that...”

— Sarah Perry

24. “Sometimes the greed and malice of what he sees appalls him so much he thinks he must’ve misunderstood; he looks again, and it’s worse than he thought.”

— Sarah Perry

25. “Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.”

— Sarah Perry

26. “Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?”

— Sarah Perry

27. “No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled.”

— Sarah Perry

28. “Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. Oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb.”

— Sarah Perry

29. “I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,” said Cora: “And I was never more happy. I can’t remember when I last looked in the mirror – ” “Yesterday,” said Martha. “You were admiring your nose.”

— Sarah Perry

30. “Let me tell you: where the knife failed, you have succeeded. He is shattered – you have turned out all his lights! You have broken all his windows.”

— Sarah Perry

31. “I said I’d go alone, but perhaps that’s the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.”

— Sarah Perry

32. “Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world.”

— Sarah Perry

33. “You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.”

— Sarah Perry

34. “I wonder, when God permitted us to fall, if He knew we’d fall so far.”

— Sarah Perry

35. “He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.”

— Sarah Perry

36. “It was just the light,’ she said, ’up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?”

— Sarah Perry

37. “Everything before it was prologue: everything after, a footnote.”

— Sarah Perry

38. “We think we know where we’re aiming, and perhaps we do – but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should’ve been trying in a different direction after all.”

— Sarah Perry

39. “He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind but mistrusts the shifting sands of man’s ingenuity.”

— Sarah Perry

40. “Every aspect of meaning is characterized by illusion.”

— Sarah Perry

41. “She’d like to say more, and explain that her years of marriage had so degraded her expectation of happiness that to sit cradling a teacup with no thought for what waited behind the curtains... seemed little short of miraculous.”

— Sarah Perry

42. “Did you really think you could carry on like that- you never wanted friends or lovers – you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants’ revolt.”

— Sarah Perry

43. “She’d never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she’d come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats.”

— Sarah Perry

44. “All the obligations and comforts of womanhood seem to have nothing to do with me now. I’m not sure how I am supposed to behave and I’m not sure I would, if I knew.”

— Sarah Perry

45. “They made me think of my students, who are so young and look at the road ahead of them happily, having no idea that the road narrows and turns back on itself, and goes through dark places, and is covered all over with things to trip you up and break your ankles.”

— Sarah Perry

46. “But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know.”

— Sarah Perry

47. “I believe for most of us – for me, certainly – what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it. Turn me inside out and I’d be quite a handsome man!”

— Sarah Perry

48. “Male pride, she thinks: the most tender, contemptible thing!”

— Sarah Perry

49. “What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split, and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river?”

— Sarah Perry

50. “There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he’d been by the end, he’d formed her, at least in part – and what good ever came of self-loathing?”

— Sarah Perry