Quotes from Joanna Trollope

I am often criticised for being rather accessible.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference... I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

She trusted her instincts; she trusted those dear to her; she trusted her emotions and her passions. She drank deep, you could see that; she squeezed every drop of living out of all the elements that mattered to her. It made her careless sometimes, of course it did, but it was a wonderfully rich and rapt way to be.

William got up and went over to the window. Outside, the autumn fields lay pleasingly striped with stubble and speckled with partridges.

We're so useful, we practical people. We hold it altogether. But we're seen as killjoys, somehow. Most unfair.

You're stuck with yourself, so you might as well try and be someone you can stand to live with.

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.

Was it worth saying that she was no longer going to do anything for anyone since it seemed to her that the more generous she was, the more she herself seemed to get punished?

Or was she going to be sensible, reliable, patient Elinor who never put her own feelings first because -- let's face it -- she didn't have any worth considering in the first place, did she?

Beneath her Marks and Spencer jersey, her heart sometimes called him darling, and after two glasses of Liebfraumilch, lover.

We all overlay our feelings with too much thinking. We are afraid of our feelings because they are arbitrary and volatile, and we often need literature to make our feelings intelligible to us, to make us see that our reaction to what we can't choose and what we can is what shapes our lives.

The thing was, with parenting grown children, you had to learn to hold your tongue. If you wanted them to tell you anything, that is.

In my experience... the danger of things getting out of hand is there whenever anyone opens their mouths.

They both got tired in term time, up for daily rehearsals, in and out of the cathedral all week for extra practices, Saturday afternoons without fail, seven sung services a week, school, homework.

If I could only meet Sally in the silent reading room of the public library, it wouldn't make any difference.

I feel at the moment I can't complete, that I've become smug and pissy and I Haven't a sense of Humor.

To her amazement, the baby, even at this stage, was a fact, and not a choice of any kind. She

Nicholas went to choral evensong on the Sunday, and could have wept. They sang part of a Tallis motet and he thought, If the time comes when nobody can hear this sound anymore, it will be the end.

The Bishop was capable of anger, but he was not capable of hate.

She was striving to change, she was, but it was hard, all the same, to let go of the glory of her past certainties, of her belief in passion, and surrender, and the seductive power of giving in to inclination.

She marched to the door and said, if I ever marry, Patrick O'Sullivan, I shall make sure that my mate for life is a decent woman, or even, maybe, a book.

staying, that he mustn't be at all demonstrative towards Vi, that it would seem, in front of the poor

Together we will ensure that for as long as we are alive to achieve it, the King's School shall send its singing boys to the cathedral as it has done these four hundred years.

It is not, Ianthe, a priest's function to be a bottomless well of woolly uncritical forgiveness. That would only devalue virtue.