112 Quotes by Sharon Kay Penman

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.

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.

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

Simon said nothing, thinking of all the good men who’d died because this inept, faithless fool had been born a King’s son.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.