Enlightenment Sarah Perry Quotes

- wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day, but because we have the inclination to look up, and wonder.

Did women really assemble themselves out of the parts they thought most likely to be wanted? Was that love's requirement? If so, she'd have none of it.

So I told her this: that it's true I've only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I've been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent, and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or confused by providence--and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses amplitude by the hour. (Thomas Hart)

...in the ordinary way we love because we're loved, and give more or less what we're given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I'd once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand that we are made in the image of God--because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree, Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I said, and you are just a little lower than the angels. (Thomas Hart)

He had the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb.

Doesn't an attempt at faith constitute faith itself? It's a dreadful thing to confuse faith with certainty.

I wish I could say, James, that we forgave each other in the end. I wish I could say: she put her head on my shoulder and I welcomed it and we laughed and said all was well. But in fact we were quiet for a long time, and we heard a television laughing across the road and the train leaving for Liverpool Street, and then she said, 'Do you think we can love each other and never ever forgive?' I didn't know, I said. But I thought we ought to try. (Thomas Hart)

Thomas [Hart] lived where he'd been born, and where (so he often thought without rancor) he'd very likely die; and if he lived alone he was not lonely, that being a condition not of solitude but of longing, and Thomas was not a discontented man.

That's how it has always been for me, she thought, falling toward nothing - she pressed at a sore place on a prickled finger where infection had set in - soon enough I won't be a woman who doesn't have children, but a woman who didn't have children - soon nobody will see me, and there'll be no more surprises.

But is your faith not all strangeness and mystery—all blood, and brimstone—all seeing nothing in the dark, stumbling, making out dim shapes with your hands?” “You speak as if we were in the Dark Ages still, as if Essex still burned its witches! No—ours is a faith of enlightenment and clarity: I am not stumbling—I am running with patience the race that is set before me—there is a lamp on my path!

I don't understand it all,' said Thomas [to Nathan]. 'I've wondered all my life what I owe to love. There was a time I felt that because I loved a man, he was in my debt--that he'd made me love him, and so he owed me his love in return. And now he is dead, and I can never receive even a part of what I gave! But the world turned and I came to believe that all we owe to love is humility and gratitude that we were ever loved at all. You think it's humble to say it cannot be real--that she's [Grace's] mistaken, since you're not free. But that's a kind of pride. Real humility is submitting with wonder and gratitude to being loved--real wisdom is submitting with wonder and gratitude to being loved--real wisdom is understanding how amazing it is, how improbable and really absurd, that she was summoned out of nothing, as we all were, and happens to breathe this air when you breathe it, and see this world when you see it, and that out of all the billions of fellow travelers it is your word she waits for as she sits alone in her room! Well: that's a responsibility and probably a terrible one, and I can't help you with it. You must work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and let me work out mine.

that wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day, but because we have the inclination to look up, and wonder.

And in fact Hale-Bopp will reach its perihelion on April Fools' Day, which I suppose is fitting - but I think on the whole I'd rather be prone to being fooled than to be too wise a man for wonder.

His hands were large and expressive, and he had moved easily in his chair, as if he felt it a pleasure to inhabit a body of which he'd never been ashamed...

When she answered, she said either it was because her father said so, or because God did; and as she answered it struck her that she was often unable to tell the difference.

She held her goodness only lightly, and how easily she might drop and break it.

And how strange it was to acquire a friend at fifty, when life was already portioned out!

He could not have explained to James how bizarre it was to see Anne Macaulay attach herself to a woman who might have been constructed like a mannequin to demonstrate every wicked thing Bethesda considered worldly.

But Anne saw painfully that the child she'd come to love was gone, and that now she was required to learn to love this stranger who'd come back from the Blackwater and taken her place.

Whatever it is.. and whoever you are, you needn't be ashamed. It wouldn't take much to bring anyone to where you've been. A bad landlord, say. A leg that broke and wouldn't set, too much trust in bad advice, a mortgage unattainable by half a per cent, and there we are: there I might be. (Thomas in fact did not quite believe this, but wanted to be kind.)

Suddenly the faith of her childhood struck her as comical: the idea that hell boiled away under the tarmac and pavements of Beechwood Avenue, that if she put her ear to the carpet she'd hear the ringing of pitchforks forged on devils' anvils, the hissing of embers on penitent flesh - how ridiculous it was, how evidently only nightmares to frighten children!

- you know it is possible to love in such a way that you command reality, that your sight cannot be trusted!

It isn't fair that beauty secures love so easily, and often without meaning to.

Every year or so, with a painful opening in the chamber of her heart where he was kept, she opened social media profiles and constructed an idea of herself that seemed to her lovable; but she never found him, and he never found her.

You can't expect only to feel one thing at a time - though certainly it would be convenient. You can want to see her, and want not to see her, and neither cancels the other out: you are a woman, not an algebraic question.

Her fellow women she views with affectionate suspicion, with an anthropological interest: their willingness to suborn themselves to men and to the mechanics of reproduction strikes her as peculiar, but she generally wishes them well.

It occurred to her then that she could say: I bargained with God, I gave him my soul, and thought you would be my reward. But she was ashamed of her childish theology, and ashamed to have lost her bargain; and how diminishing, she thought, how absolutely debased I would be, if this man with a whole life elsewhere knew I'd set such a high price on his love!

Yes,' he said, 'I can believe it. I could believe anything of you' - but his smile was charming, easy, costing him nothing; there again was the suspicion he spoke to her as he might have spoken to friends of his daughter, with a fondness that was instinctive and not particular.

The pain in his hip set in with the insistent spit it generally reserved for winter, and this was the effect of boredom: there was nothing else to occupy his mind.

All I've done lately that was worth doing was find a lost cat on Lower Bridge Road and take her to her owner - but she was lost again the following week, and so it all begins again.

She burrowed against him with an impulse of affection and pleasure. It seemed to Thomas that even to watch them was a trespass, and nobody, he thought, a bit of old string in his hand, nobody on earth was ever as solitary as me.

Thomas moved across his kitchen, and fancifully it occurred to him that the motion of his body displaced the universe - that it slipped aside to accommodate him; that it might be said that he was no less significant, and certainly no more, than a comet dispensing its days of ordinary grace. The gold heart was beating on the table. You are here, Thomas Hart. Here you are.

I'm already coming to know you, whether you like it or not. A little mad, I think; handsome and rich; bad-tempered and clever and miserably in love. And I'm mad too, I suppose, talking to a dead woman—what's got into me?

Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you?

It was good of you to come," he said. He did not say: please come back to me soon.

But I won't have you think my heart was broken because it was a man I loved. My heart was broken because I am alive.

All we owe to love is humility and gratitude that we were ever loved at all.

how I can go on believing it, I always come down to this: that wanting God is God himself. He exists in the stars not because he made them on the fourth day,

Then what do you believe now?” She laughed, and saw his responding gleam, and was grateful. “If I wake up convinced there’s no God,” she said, “I’ll find him by lunchtime. But if I go to bed and pray for the salvation of my soul, I’ll know I’ve got no soul to save by breakfast.