Karen Maitland Quotations

I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived

Id love to own Newstead, partly because it belonged to Lord Byron, but also to try to uncover what dark secrets really lie beneath.

But then, the flames of a fire are not made less painful by the knowledge that others are burning with you.

Home is the place you return to when you have finally lost your soul. Home is the place where life is born, not the place of your birth, but the place where you seek rebirth. When you no longer have to remember which tale of your own past is true and which is an invention, when you know that you are an invention, then is the time to seek out your home. Perhaps only when you have come to understand that can you finally reach home.

Rain slips through your fingers as easily as words blow away in the wind, and yet it has the power to destroy your whole world.

They all wait impatiently for the blessed cloak of darkness to cover their wretched little deeds, but the sun will not be hurried by the whims of men.

You've heard tales of beauty and the beast. How a fair maid falls in love with a monster and sees the beauty of his soul beneath the hideous visage. But you've never heard the tale of the handsome man falling for the monstrous woman and finding joy in her love, because it doesn't happen, not even in a story-teller's tale.

People sense that our reaction to phenomena such as epidemics or religious war is not that different to how we reacted to plagues or to battles a millennia ago.

The English king's power was curbed by Parliament, though that wasn't always a good thing, as politicians often behave no better than monarchs - there are just more of them.

We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.