The Essex Serpent Quotes

It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.

Cora, you cannot always keep yourself away from things that hurt you. We all wish we could, but we cannot: to live at all is to be bruised.

Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world

We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light,

in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement — you see the difference?

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.

We are cleaved together - we are cleaved apart - everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his: children of the earth lost in wonder.

CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.

anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time

I believe for most of us - for me, certainly - what's below the skin is more worth looking at than what's outside it. Turn me inside out and I'd be quite a handsome man!

I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and am content without you. Even so, come quickly!

You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.

Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that...

Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?

I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,” said Cora: “And I was never more happy. I can’t remember when I last looked in the mirror—” “Yesterday,” said Martha. “You were admiring your nose.

Luke diagnosed himself to be in love, and sought no cure for the disease.

Besides(..), it's a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved.

what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.

He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.

I said I'd go alone, but perhaps that's the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.

But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know.

I eat an egg for my supper and drink Guinness with it and read Brontë and Hardy, Dante and Keats, Henry James and Conan Doyle.

We've loved each other so long I've never been a man and not loved her.

We think we know where we're aiming, and perhaps we do - but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should've been trying in a different direction after all.

The wonderful thing about being a widow is that, really, you’re not obliged to be much of a woman anymore—

She'd never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she'd come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats.

But in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement—you see the difference?

Male pride, she thinks: the most tender, contemptible thing!

Did you really think you could carry on like that- you never wanted friends or lovers - you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants' revolt.

They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by growing swiftly bad-tempered ('You don't understand!' 'How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?').

Friendship is not crumbs—you’re not grubbing around for scraps while someone else takes the whole loaf. It’s all I’ve got to give. All right, once I might have had more—but for now, it’s all I’ve got.

The windows in her room were open and light was fading on the wall. She said, ‘There may be blood,’ and he said, ‘Better that way – better’; and it was Cora’s mouth he kissed, and Cora’s hand she placed where she wanted it most. Each was only second best: they wore each other like hand-me-down coats.

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafés on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.

Don't write. Don't come. I don't need it. It's not why I've written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility - I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself. It's the most that I can give and cannot be enough.

Martha says I never looked odder or uglier, but you know I’ve always thought beauty a curse and am more than happy to dispense with it completely. Sometimes I forget that I’m a woman—at least—I forget to THINK OF MYSELF AS A WOMAN. All the obligations and comforts of womanhood seem to have nothing to do with me now. I’m not sure how I am supposed to behave and I’m not sure I would, if I knew.

She'd like to say more, and explain that her years of marriage had so degraded her expectation of happiness that to sit cradling a teacup with no thought for what waited behind the curtains...seemed little short of miraculous.

All the obligations and comforts of womanhood seem to have nothing to do with me now. I’m not sure how I am supposed to behave and I’m not sure I would, if I knew.

He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind but mistrusts the shifting sands of man's ingenuity.

Sometimes the greed and malice of what he sees appalls him so much he thinks he must’ve misunderstood; he looks again, and it’s worse than he thought.

...But doesn't it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.

It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?

it’s when we’re most lost and feeling most lacking in grace that the source of comfort is nearest

We are cleaved together – we are cleaved apart – everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.

I have an ally, she thought: he will never let me go. Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret; because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather.

What a mess, he thought: what a mess we make. If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.

There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he'd been by the end, he'd formed her, at least in part - and what good ever came of self-loathing?

He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it; spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light, you and I.

He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness.

...in rooms in Camden and Woolwich time was cruel to lovers wondering how it got so late so soon, and in due course was kind to their ordinary wounds.

Let me tell you: where the knife failed, you have succeeded. He is shattered - you have turned out all his lights! You have broken all his windows.

To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time - and so we try again.

I think it possible to put flesh on the bones of our terrors, most of all when we have turned our back on God.

Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.

I love you and I am content without you. Even so, come quickly!

Cora, you cannot always keep yourself away from things that hurt you. We all wish that we could, but we cannot: to live at all is to be bruised.

I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t yet know; but lately I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world.

...she was bound by whalebone, pierced with ivory, pinned by the hair with tortoiseshell.

My thoughts are so tangled they'll take a mile or more to unravel.

Grace," he said suddenly. "On Sunday I'll talk about the quality of grace, which I suppose is a gift of a kind---of goodness and mercy undeserved, and unexpected." "That'll do for your sermon," she said. "That's quite enough. Let them go home early and walk in the forest, and find God there.

Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges.

She’s the kind of woman who’s misunderstood: they think because she’s so pretty and wears her clothes so well, and because she gossips and chatters, that she’s nothing but a ballerina in a jewelry box turning round and round; but I knew from her first letter that she’d a sharpness to her—I don’t think she misses anything, not even now.

On the streets you'll stay, and your children, and it'll be no more than you deserve. We are punishing poverty," she said, pushing away her plate: "If you are poor, and miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there's precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty.

That's the great crime: that no-one need be put in chains when their own minds are shackles enough. Once I thought we were no better than horses tied to the plough, but it's so much worse — we're only moving parts in their machinery — just the bolts on the wheel, the axle turning round and round!

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. Oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb.

All that is solid melts into air,” she said, testing his courage. “Shakespeare?” he said. Smiling, relenting, Martha said, “Karl Marx, I’m afraid, though he was a bard of sorts.

Cherry blossoms drifted on the idle wind.

Own nothing which is not beautiful or useful, she’d once said, and he was neither.

I believe for most of us—for me, certainly—what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it.

[H]is brow bulged above his eyes as if it could barely contain the range and ferocity of his intellect.

I’m going to start by telling you a story, because anything that was ever worth knowing began with ‘once upon a time.’ ” “As

But she'd been 17, and armor-clad with youth, and never felt the blade go in. She'd laughed, and so had he.

strangers come over the threshold and you never know what they might become

Cracknell’s funeral is well-attended, since no-one’s as loved as the dead.

But it pleases me to think of you and me standing there together. Ungodly of me I am sure, but I would rather we were both deceived than I alone.

One o'clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory.

The air was sweet and clear: it went in like good wine.

No congregants but foxes, no pews but beds of nettle.

Isn't it odd, how strangers come over the threshold and you never know what they might become.

You think—you really think—that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?” “Not only my reason—there’s not enough of that to set against my soul!—but my liberty.

How was the journey?' 'A child cried from Liverpool Street to Chelmsford, and only stopped when Garrett told him he'd lose all the water from his body, shrivel up, and be dead by Manningtree.

The fear of the crowd then came to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgement, but that they were not, and could never be.

before them the checkered path was bordered by blue hyacinths. They gave out a strong scent, and Cora reeled with it, felt it indecent—it caused a response in her so like unsought desire that her pulse quickened.

If you are poor, and miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there’s precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty.

For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away.

For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books.

What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sub-let, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten.

She’d prized Will’s affection because it was impossible that he might want her as Michael once had; his affection was bounded off on all sides by Stella, and his faith, and by what she’d gratefully thought was his complete failure to notice she was a woman. ‘I might as well be a head in a jar of formaldehyde, for all he cares,’ she’d once said to Martha: ‘It’s why he prefers to write to me than see me – I’m only a mind, not a body: I’m safe as a child – don’t you see how I might prefer it?’ And she believed it, too.

Yesterday I walked to Clerkenwell in the morning and stood by the iron grate where the Fleet flows, and listened, and imagined I heard the waters of all the rivers I have known - the head of the Fleet at Hampstead where I played when I was young, and the wide Thames, and the Blackwater, with its secrets that were hardly worth keeping. Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and the shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, something joined. The sun on my back through the window is warm and I hear a chaffinch singing. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you.

They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by growing swiftly bad-tempered (‘You don’t understand!’ ‘How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?’).

She seemed to him neither man nor woman, but some other sex entirely. How she stood in the window with a hand pressed to the scooped hollow of her back, how once between her shoulder blades he’d seen sweat blot her dress: these gave him a thirst he was afraid he could never drink deep enough to sate.

Don’t write. Don’t come. I don’t need it. It’s not why I’ve written. Do you think my love will starve without your crumbs? Do you think I am not capable of humility? THIS is humility – I will tell you that I love you and know that you cannot return it. I will debase myself. It’s the most that I can give and cannot be enough.

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!

Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you. Even so, come quickly!

The point is not what I see, but what I feel; I cannot see the ether, yet I feel it enter and depart, and depend upon it. I feel that something is coming; sooner or later, my words be marked. It has been before, as well you know, and it will come again, if not in my lifetime in yours, or in your children’s, or in your children’s children’s, and so I will gird my loins up, Parson, and if I might make bold a moment, I would recommend that you do similar.

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance - not quite animal, but not merely earth: where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

She’d prized Will’s affection because it was impossible that he might want her as Michael once had; his affection was bounded off on all sides by Stella, and his faith, and by what she’d gratefully thought was his complete failure to notice she was a woman. ‘I might as well be a head in a jar of formaldehyde, for all he cares,’ she’d once said to Martha: ‘It’s why he prefers to write to me than see me – I’m only a mind, not a body: I’m safe as a child – don’t you see how I might prefer it?’ And she believed it, too.

Oh, she had loved him – no-one could ever have loved more: she’d been too young to withstand it, a child intoxicated by an inch of drink. He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness. He had been so sombre that when attempts at levity made him laugh she’d felt an empress in command of an army; he was so stern, and so remote, that the first moment he embraced her had been a battle won. She’d not known then that these were the common tricks of a common trickster, to cede a skirmish and later lay her waste. In the years that followed, her fear of him was so very like her love – attended by the same fast-paced heart, the same broken nights, the same alertness to his footstep in the hall – that she was drunk on that, too. No other man had touched her, and so she could not tell how strange it was to be subject to pain as much as pleasure. No other man had loved her, and so she could not judge whether the sudden withdrawal of his approval was natural as the tide and as implacable.

Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret; because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather. She worshiped him with many small acts of devotion, wondering at his marvelous foot, its skin like the thin silk covering of a cushion; she passed hours in stroking it with the tip of her finger and seeing how he spread his toes in delight—that he could take pleasure! That she could give it! His curled hand was a cockleshell warmed by the sun—she held it between her lips—she was astonished by him, that those small hands, those feet, contained such multitudes.