Quotes from Anya Seton

I am sure that no man asks mercy and grace with true meaning, but if mercy and grace have first been given him.

The soul ... may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.

There are many trails up the mountain, but in time they all reach the top.

Life is malleable and the hammer is desire.

I only know that from wherever it is that we're going there can be no turning back

A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.

Nay, it's not the Devil been leading her astray. It's books! That girl has been nothing but trouble ever since she learned how to read.

Truth is naturally universal...and shines into many different windows, though many are clouded.

Her lips were drawn to his like a moth to a flame.

I only know that from wherever it is that we're going there can be no turning back

There are many trails up the mountain, but in time they all reach the top.

He was all sin and mystery, and Miranda feared the pleasures he offered as she feared the fires of hell. Yet when she succumbed at last, it was not because her body was weak but because her mind was curious.

I am sure that no man asks mercy and grace with true meaning, but if mercy and grace have first been given him.

I guess every disaster, every tragedy in the world, my lad, is caused by someone's selfishness and refusal to recognize the rights of others.

Miranda looked up at him through a haze of desire, her will consumed by a fierce crackling heat, just like the dry twigs of the old woman's fire.

Elizabeth squirmed on the hard wooden bench, and tried to ignore both her sore backside and her rumbling stomach. Why did the minister's sermons last so long? And why did the talk of sin always give her such a hearty appetite?

He wasn't strong. He was weak. The weakest thing in the world. A man who lives only for himself

Her body consented willingly to all that her soul found most abhorrent. As Nicholas had promised, there was a hellish delight in knowing she was damned.

Elizabeth knew it was a fast day, but the rumbling in her belly was harder to ignore than the grumbling of the preacher.

If I should never see him again—she thought, Blessed Mother, how could I live, and yet it was the fear of seeing him again which had driven her to this desperate haste. The fear that if he were there so near her she

No matter how dutiful one tried to feel, it was impossible to be sad at leaving this behind, not when the blood ran hot and rich in the veins, and when out in the world there were all the untried beckoning enchantments : dancing, sensuous music, merriment - and love.

She had not, as yet, enough introspection to realize that part of his fascination for her had arisen from his unpredictability, and her conception of him as a mysterious being from a superior world who had miraculously condescended to desire her. Nor did she realize how tightly she was enmeshed by his physical attraction, a bondage woven not only from the magnetism of his body but from the very fear and pain he caused her

There was no such thing as pure happiness. How many years it took to learn that! Always some dark fretted thing which unbalanced the ease one had laboriously found.

in that hushed hour between midnight and dawn when Morpheus' sable hands touch the rosy finger tips of Aurora and even the fairies are slumbering on their flowery couches