Karen Maitland Quotes

“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.”

— Karen Maitland

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.

— Karen Maitland

“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.”

— Karen Maitland

“Reckon it's best if you don't have anyone you care about; then it can't hurt you. Don't have to be afraid of losing someone if you no one to lose.”

— Karen Maitland

“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.”

— Karen Maitland

The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, 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.

— Karen Maitland

“Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?'
He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.
'No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no selfdoubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right, that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.”

— Karen Maitland

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

— Karen Maitland

We couldn't bring the sheep back to life, so there was nothing for it but to eat the evidence.

— Karen Maitland

“Hope is a beautiful lie and it requires talent to create it for others.”

— Karen Maitland

We had taken her for granted until she was no longer there, like an ancient tree you don't truly see until it is felled, and then only from the empty space in the sky do you suddenly grasp its stature.

— Karen Maitland

“Mortals are strange creatures; they cling to life even when that life is nothing but pain and misery, yet they will throw away their lives for a word, an idea, even a flag. Wolves piss to mark their territory. Smell the stench of another pack and wolves will quietly slink away. Why risk a fight when it might maim or kill you? But humans will slash and slaughter in their thousands to plant their little piece of cloth on a hill or hang it from a battlement.”

— Karen Maitland

Sometimes mercy is not a kindness and pity is not love.

— Karen Maitland

There was a new king and his name was pestilence. And he had created a new law - thou shalt do anything to survive.

— Karen Maitland

King John won't need any persuading that the French have a hand in this. From what I've heard, if a bean gives him a bellyache he swears it was a French one.

— Karen Maitland

“Hope itself is always genuine. It's only what it's placed in that can prove to be false.”

— Karen Maitland

They were just the ordinary sounds of of people beginning their day, silly raucous, discordant, but they were the most beautiful sounds on earth, the sounds of living people.

— Karen Maitland

“She's one of the fay folk; half of her is a woman, but she has the legs of a goat, except no one ever sees those for she hides them under her robes. She sleeps deep in the black pool while it's day, but at witch-light she rises in robes green as pond weed, glowing in the dark with her silver hair trailing behind her. She's so beautiful any man who glimpses her can't take his eyes off her. but that's just her witchery for inside she's really a withered old crone with a heart as black as a marsh pool.”

— Karen Maitland

“I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth.”

— Karen Maitland

“Why do mortals think that suffering is a coin with which they can buy justice or salvation? ... life is a steal if you are a talented thief, and if you are not, then you may suffer all you please but if will buy you nothing but pain.”

— Karen Maitland

God's hand can be seen in any occurrence for those who are determined to find it there, but then again, so can the devil's

— Karen Maitland

“Pay heed, my darlings, and always take the greatest care over the company you keep in life: if death strikes you without warning, you may be stuck with them til the moon turns to blood and wouldn't that be a torment?”

— Karen Maitland

“Miracles are like murders. After the first one, each becomes easier than the last for, with each success, the miracle-worker's certainty in himself becomes stronger.”

— Karen Maitland

“He was a good-looking man, but then rogues usually are”

— Karen Maitland

“But, then again, the actions of the most insignificant men or women can be as a single raindrop that rolls a pebble that dislodges a clod that tumbles a rock and, before you know it, the whole mountainside has crashed down, sweeping palaces and pigsties, princes and paupers into the sea. So maybe there are demons at work, even in the smallest mischief”

— Karen Maitland

“The hand of a man hanged on the gallows has healing powers. If it be stroked across a sore, tumour or goitre, the evil shall pass to the dead man and the sick will be cured. If a woman be barren she should go to a gibbet at night, climb up and reach through the bars and draw the corpse's hand across her womb three or seven times and her curse will leave her. Lincoln”

— Karen Maitland

“A witch cannot die until her familiars or imps are dead. If a witch desires to put an end to her suffering she must call each familiar by name and order it to die. Then, when the last is dead, she too will die. Greetwell Edward”

— Karen Maitland

“You have already excommunicated half the village because they will not pay their tithes. So why wouldn't they come to us? Can you excommunicate them twice over? As for the sick, most are here because the Mother Church in her great charity has already damned them and driven them out. The churches are emptier than a pauper's purse and little wonder, for men get more solace from the alewives than from their priests. More stand now outside your church than within it. What difference does it make if you forbid them burial in your churchyard, since they cannot afford the soul-scot you charge them to be buried there? Those who still look to God make their prayers far away from the church, where the air is sweeter and their voices are not smothered beneath your hypocrisy and greed.”

— Karen Maitland

“In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.”

— Karen Maitland

“People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.”

— Karen Maitland

“We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.”

— Karen Maitland

In 1255, Louis IX of France presented an elephant to Henry III of England to add to the menagerie of exotic animals he kept in the Tower of London.

— Karen Maitland

“I'd love to own Newstead, partly because it belonged to Lord Byron, but also to try to uncover what dark secrets really lie beneath.”

— Karen Maitland

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.

— Karen Maitland

“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.”

— Karen Maitland

Besides, I'm not sure they let ferrets into Heaven and I'd miss old Mavet.

— Karen Maitland

“The monk, Gregory the Great, tells how a nun, in her greed, ate a lettuce without first making the sign of the cross to protect herself against the evil spirits that hide between its leaves, and so she became possessed by a demon. Greetwell”

— Karen Maitland

I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.

— Karen Maitland

If anyone fears theft, let him scatter caraway seeds among those things of value and if a thief should try to steal them he shall be held in that place. Likewise, if a woman fears her husband may stray she should sew caraway seeds into his clothes, so that no other woman may steal him away from her. Mistress

— Karen Maitland