Top 120 Sarah Winman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “So, time heals. Mostly. Sometimes carelessly. And in unsuspecting moments, the pain catches and reminds one of all that’s been missing. The fulcrum of what might have been. But then it passes. Winter moves into spring and swallows return. The proximity of new skin returns to the sheets. Beauty does what is required. Jobs fulfil and conversations inspire. Loneliness becomes a mere Sunday. Scattered clothes. Empty bowls. Rotting fruit. Passing time. But still life in all its beauty and complexity.”

— Sarah Winman

52. “So, thought Peace, there was a wall around his heart and she wondered whether she should hoist up her skirt and scale that wall, but she knew she didn’t have the right shoes on for that sort of climb because hers were too sensible for a man like Drake.”

— Sarah Winman

53. “How beautiful is sunset, when the glow of heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou paradise of exiles, Italy.”

— Sarah Winman

54. “No single act of generosity remains in isolation. The ripples are many.”

— Sarah Winman

55. “I shall remain astonished.”

— Sarah Winman

56. “Tree said, Thanks for everything. It’s been nice knowing you. You too, said Cress. Will you be OK? I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before. Done what? Goodbyes. Really? Think about it. Leaves.”

— Sarah Winman

57. “It’s what we’ve always done. Left a mark on a cave, or on a page. Showing who we are, sharing our view of the world, the life we’re made to bear. Our turmoil is revealed in those painted faces – sometimes tenderly, sometimes grotesquely, but art becomes a mirror. All the symbolism and the paradox, ours to interpret. That’s how it becomes part of us.”

— Sarah Winman

58. “All those moments, those years, were his now. To remember or to forget. That’s what Ulysses said. So I choose to remember. The best man ever. And everything about him is vivid. And he is young. And he is laughing.”

— Sarah Winman

59. “What are we without love? Waiting, said Evelyn.”

— Sarah Winman

60. “She trekked back across the meadow and down through the trees in possession of the oldest secret known to man. She sat on the mooring stone and surrendered immediately to the down of night. She hadn’t slept long before she suddenly jolted awake. Thought she had heard the sweet call of a lark ascending. Unaware that it was actually the sound of her soul awakening.”

— Sarah Winman

61. “When he stopped, she bent down and kissed him on the head and said, Thank you. Because everything she held on and everything she believed in came together in that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things.”

— Sarah Winman

62. “We’re still living in the footprints of the French Revolution, of Hitler and Mussolini. Scratch the surface of the varnish and it raises its head again. Evil was defeated but it never went away.”

— Sarah Winman

63. “That was the world he inhabited between the time of it happening and the time of him knowing. A brief window, not yet shattered, when music still stirred, when beer still tasted good, when dreams could still be hatched at the sight of a plane careering across a perfect summer sky.”

— Sarah Winman

64. “Do I believe in a mystery – the unexplained phenomenon that is life itself? The greater something that illuminates inconsequence in our lives, that gives us something to strive for as well as the humility to brush ourselves down and start all over again? Then yes, I do. It is the source of art, of beauty, of love, and proffers the ultimate goodness to mankind. That to me is God. That to me is life. That is what I believe in.”

— Sarah Winman

65. “Fifteen sunflowers, some in bloom and some turning. Yellow on yellow pigment that darkened to ochre. Yellow earthenware vase decorated by a complementary blue line that cut across its middle. The original was painted by one of the loneliest men on earth. But painted in a frenzy of optimism and gratitude and hope. A celebration of the transcendent power of the color yellow.”

— Sarah Winman

66. “Those left behind prayed constantly for peace but prayers came back with Return to Sender stamped all over them. Only the roll call of the dead grew.”

— Sarah Winman

67. “Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgement. Captures forever that which is fleeting.”

— Sarah Winman

68. “Two ends of the spectrum, the haves and have-nots, whether it be faith or money or tolerance.”

— Sarah Winman

69. “And for two hours the wine was poured, the cheese cut, and the two men talked. Of what? Who knows? Of love, of war, of the past. And they listened with hearts instead of ears, and in the candle-lit kitchen three floors up in an old palazzo, death was put on hold.”

— Sarah Winman

70. “Santissima Annunziata in the north, Santo Spirito in the south, Santa Maria Novella over in the west, and Santa Croce in the east.”

— Sarah Winman

71. “I carried the tree into the front room where cloves had punctured the skin of oranges and I could see where you had been only minutes before. Your indent was still warm on the sofa with a book open to its side, a table with an empty plate, a cardigan, and the slow fade of a fire.”

— Sarah Winman

72. “In time, Cress hoped to lose his fear of poetry, especially the stuff that didn’t rhyme. Cress was a facts man, and facts were stone. Poetry, though, was sand. Ever compared to stars in its granular infinity. Ever shifting.”

— Sarah Winman

73. “Marvellous blossomed, having quite forgotten what an exciting and necessary jolt being needed gave.”

— Sarah Winman

74. “When we left the house both my mother and father had shed a tear as their beloved son walked out into the cold night air dressed as a daughter, unsure as to what he might return as. That, my father would later say, was one of the unexpected gifts of parenthood.”

— Sarah Winman

75. “The creek was hers now and yet she felt nothing. It had been the longest walk of her life for no one was at the end waiting for her. She slept through winter. Missed Christmas and awoke to a New Year. She felt so lost. Until the first bluebells and ramsons colored the green-brown floor of her world.”

— Sarah Winman

76. “But most of all I wrote about him – now called Max – my brother, our friend, missing now for 10 days. And I wrote about what I’d lost that morning. The witness of my soul, my shadow in childhood when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and God was a rabbit.”

— Sarah Winman

77. “Talking bollocks because of the drugs.”

— Sarah Winman

78. “To what shall we toast? said Darnley. What do you think, Temps? To this moment, sir. Oh, very good, said Evelyn. To this moment.”

— Sarah Winman

79. “Soon the river would narrow and carve through water rushes and overhanging trees still dripping with weed and flotsam from the previous high tide; it was the stretch I never trusted, the stretch of river that pulled my imagination as taut as rope around a cleat, and where I saw thick gnarled roots crawling across the mudflats.”

— Sarah Winman

80. “I’M IN G’S ROOM watching the late news. The BBC reporting from Germany. The Berlin Wall is down and the gates are open. Cars are honking, friends and families are reunited and champagne is drunk. Chloe comes in and brings me a tea. She puts her arm around me and says, nodding to the TV, No one thought this was possible ten years ago. And now look. Life changes in ways we can never imagine. Walls come down and people are free. You wait, she says. I know what she’s trying to say: Hope.”

— Sarah Winman

81. “And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgement, he knew, was love.”

— Sarah Winman

82. “Nothing to do with patriotism. I believe in the unity of the world. I believe in the power of people working together.”

— Sarah Winman

83. “You can stay that side and I’ll stay over here. And we won’t touch. We’ll just be company for one another, and company at any age is good.”

— Sarah Winman

84. “What’s going on?” sang Marvin Gaye, but no one had an answer.”

— Sarah Winman

85. “People knew as they lay alone at night that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory.”

— Sarah Winman

86. “But I’m not patient, said Marvellous. I’m diligent.”

— Sarah Winman

87. “He jumped on the train with galoshes, a K-Way rain jacket and one change of clothing. He looked out from the ferry as England pulled away. He was going to Florence to save art. He was a sixties man through and through, and peace and love pulsed through his pulmonic and aortic valves. And he smiled wide now that his teeth were fixed.”

— Sarah Winman

88. “And there they left Cress to become a tree.”

— Sarah Winman

89. “The choir sang and the old man sang and Drake couldn’t sing, and suddenly he began to cry because of the music, because of the sound of the boys’ voices, because of what they might turn into.”

— Sarah Winman

90. “Really, though, it was about her touch and gaze, because when either fell on him, neither wanted to let him go.”

— Sarah Winman

91. “We like beauty, don’t we? Something good on the eye cheers us. Does something to us on a cellular level, makes us feel alive and enriched. Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgment. Captures forever that which is fleeting. A meager stain in the corridors of history, that’s all we are. A little mark of scuff.”

— Sarah Winman

92. “What was it about these roads that plunged him into a state of childlike anxiety? The light had virtually disappeared by the time he reached the front door, and a feeling of foreboding had taken hold.”

— Sarah Winman

93. “He thought they looked so happy, and he thought they were family, and he wanted to show that in the photograph. They were all that mattered.”

— Sarah Winman

94. “And my father went back into the forest and chopped down a tree. The sound of the trunk fracturing and splintering and falling to earth was the sound his heart would have made, could it speak.”

— Sarah Winman

95. “I thought this is how it would be if the sun died. The gentle shutting down of an organ; sleepy no longer working. No explosion at the end of life just the slow disintegration into darkness where life as we know it never wakes up because nothing reminds us that we have to.”

— Sarah Winman

96. “Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.”

— Sarah Winman

97. “I had feet not fins, my father’s brow and my mother’s eyes. But, more importantly, I had my mother’s heart.”

— Sarah Winman

98. “The perverse pull of the past drew him inside to the back room, virtually unaltered since the days of his youth.”

— Sarah Winman

99. “I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible.”

— Sarah Winman

100. “Eighteen months ago, the phone rang. Yes? I said. What now? I said. What – But there was silence. G? Silence. He began to cry. Talk to me, I said. Silence. I’ve got it, he said. It: the shorthand we all understood. I said I’d never leave his side.”

— Sarah Winman