Quotes from Ellis Peters

I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.

The lodging arrangements had certainly been inspired, though whether by an angel or an imp remained to be seen.

Even the very system of bishoprics galled the devout adherents of the old, saintly Celtic church, that had no worldly trappings, courted no thrones, but rather withdrew from the world into the blessed solitude of thought and prayer.

Even grief has its arrogance." "Then you have learned, my son, that vengeance belongs only to God?" "More than that, Father," said Luc. "I have learned that in God's hands vengeance is safe. However long delayed, however strangely manifested, the reckoning is sure.

Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.

What is done matters, but what is yet to do matters far more.

Official justice does not dig deep, but regards what comes readily to the surface, and draws conclusions accordingly.

The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight.

It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit or robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern all. But

There is a certain unbending rigidity about Augustine that offers little compassion to anyone with whom he disagrees. Cadfael was never going to surrender his private reservations about any reputed saint who could describe humankind as a mass of corruption and sin proceeding inevitably towards death, or one who could look upon the world, for all its imperfections, and find it irredeemably evil.

She looked from his face into the face of the dead man. She knew he was dead. She also knew that the dead speak, often in thunder.

But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust.

But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.

So Rhun had arrived at the last frontier of belief, and fallen, or emerged, or soared into the region where the soul realises that pain is of no account, that to be within the secret of God is more than well being, and past the power of the tongue to utter. To embrace the decree of pain is to translate it, to shed it like a rain of blessing on others who have not yet understood.

You are looking at a murdered man, Father Prior. A man's hand fitted that arrow, a man's hand drew the bow, and for a man's reason. There must have been others who had a grudge against Rhisiart, others whose plans he was obstructing, besides Saint Winifred. Why blame this killing on her?

What you do and what you are is what matters.

you will tell me roundly that God's reach is longer than man's." "It had better be," said Brother Cadfael very solemnly, "otherwise we are all lost." Turn the page to continue reading from the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael

On the fine, bright morning in early May when the whole sensational affair of the Gwytherin relics may properly be considered to have begun, Brother Cadfael had been up long before Prime, pricking out cabbage seedlings before the day was aired, and his thoughts were all on birth, growth and fertility, not at all on graves and reliquaries and violent deaths, whether of saints, sinners or ordinary decent, fallible men like himself.

But there comes a time when the old grow very tired, and the load of leadership unjustly heavy to bear. And perhaps—perhaps!—Heribert would not be quite so sad as even he now supposed, if the load should be lifted from him.

Beware how you pass judgment on your superiors," he said mildly, "at least until you know how to put yourself in their place and see from their view.

He goes back to his childhood, as old men do.

Kings and princes of the church may find shepherds and serfs preferred before them