Top 60 Sharon Kay Penman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I inhale hope with every breath I take.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

2. “Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

3. “How fragile life was, how fleeting their days on earth, and how fickle was Death, claiming the young as often as the old, the healthy as often as the ailing, cruelly stealing away a baby’s first breath, a mother’s fading heartbeat.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

4. “For every wound, the ointment of time.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

5. “Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

6. “Forget the threat of Hell’s infernal flames. The true torture would condemn a man to wait and wait and wait – for an eternity.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

7. “It was just like him, she thought; with him, a happy ending was always a foregone conclusion. But such was the power of his faith that when she was with him; she found herself believing in happy endings, too.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

8. “Those who served both the Almighty and secular lords did their best to follow Jesus’s teachings and render unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s, all the while praying they’d never have to choose between the two.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

9. “Why is it honesty when a man speaks his mind and madness when a woman does?”

— Sharon Kay Penman

10. “It is not easy to be stranded between two worlds, the sad truth is that we can never feel completely comfortable in either world.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

11. “In time of war, the Devil makes more room in Hell.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

12. “During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil’s own accomplices.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

13. “I once came upon a definition of history as ‘the process by which complex truths are transformed into simplified falsehoods’. That is particularly true in the case of Richard III, where the normal medieval proclivity for moralizing and partisanship was further complicated by deliberate distortion to serve Tudor political needs.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

14. “When people want to insult a man, they cast slurs upon his courage. But the worst they can say about a woman is to impugn her chastity.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

15. “There is nothing worse than an enemy with imagination.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

16. “We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?”

— Sharon Kay Penman

17. “I’ll admit that my garden now grows hope in lavish profusion, leaving little room for anything else. I suppose it has squeezed out more practical plants like caution and common sense. Still, though, hope does not flourish in every garden, and I feel thankful it has taken root in mine.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

18. “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

19. “I’ve never been so hungry that I was willing to lick honey off thorns.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

20. “Oh, John is clever enough. But what do brains avail a man if he does lack for backbone?”

— Sharon Kay Penman

21. “There are secret sins and found-out sins, and it is foolish to worry about the first until it becomes the second.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

22. “I’d not want to answer for the lives of other men; not at seventeen, by God’s Grace.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

23. “Men kill for many reasons, they steal but for one-greed.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

24. “She wanted to order him clapped in irons, as he so deserved. But she was stopped by what she saw in the faces of the watching men: disapproval, instinctive and involuntary, but disapproval, nonetheless. They were not comfortable when power was wielded by a woman, not at a man’s expense, a man who had just acquitted himself so spectacularly at Lincoln, winning their reluctant respect in a way she knew she never could.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

25. “Outside, the sky was clear, stars gleaming in its ebony vastness like celestial fireflies. It was bitterly cold, and Hywel’s every breath trailed after him in pale puffs of smoke. The glazed snow crackled underfoot as he started towards the great hall.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

26. “There’s not a man alive who doesn’t know fear, Dickon. The brave man is the one who has learned to hide it, that’s all.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

27. “The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

28. “Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

29. “Just because something has always been done a certain way does not make it right.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

30. “Ned never argued with their father, he was unfailingly polite and then nonchalantly went his own way; whereas, he, Edmund, deferred dutifully to his father’s authority and then found himself resenting both his parent’s austere discipline and his own reluctance to rebel.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

31. “He was too astute a politician, too ambitious a Prince, to confuse friendship with statecraft.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

32. “If that’s how you’d rather remember it. But I did not mean that as a reproach. I do not, in truth, think less of you for having the common sense to abandon a ship once waves began to break over the bow. Nor, after sixteen years shut away from the sun, am I likely to find tears to spare for Henry Plantagenet.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

33. “It puzzled Maud that her male relatives could not see this. Was it that men could not believe a woman might share their ambitions, their need for power? Eleanor saw herself as more than Henry’s queen, mother of his children. First and foremost, she was Duchess of Aquitaine, never doubting that she could have ruled as well as any man and better than most.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

34. “Whilst stupidity may indeed be a sin, it is also possible to be too clever. I sometimes fear, John, that you are too clever by half.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

35. “I should like to freeze in time all those I do love... Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!”

— Sharon Kay Penman

36. “Hal and Richard show all the good will of Cain and Abel.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

37. “If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who’ve yet to meet him.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

38. “De Mortimer was willing to wager his hopes for salvation that self-interest was the one drink no man refused, but he had never understood why most men must sweeten it so lavishly ere they could swallow it.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

39. “He believed that his superior intellect mattered more than his physical defects and saw no reason why he must defer to these fortunate young men with handsome faces and healthy bodies and empty heads.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

40. “The day that he accused a reigning King of murder was the day he signed his own death warrant, and he knew it.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

41. “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

42. “She found it ironic that, even after marrying twice and raising four sons to manhood, the workings of the male brain remained such a mystery to her.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

43. “To call it a “setback” is like calling the Expulsion from Eden a minor misunderstanding.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

44. “I suppose I should just be thankful that since you are so much given to treachery, you’re so reassuringly inept at it.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

45. “Abigail Adams could become my favorite historical sleuth.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

46. “Get some sleep. Our troubles will still be there on the morrow.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

47. “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

48. “Barbed banter was the coin of their realm and heartfelt admissions of affection were rejected out of hand as counterfeit.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

49. “I’d just rather not reap a crop every year.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

50. “But in all honesty, I do not find it so peculiar a notion, that a Welshman should rule Wales.”

— Sharon Kay Penman