1
" Child, [death] is with us always,” said Cadfael, patient beside him. “Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.”
“Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust. "
― Ellis Peters , Saint Peter's Fair (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #4)
6
" the urgent need came over him, since he had lost some offices during the day, to recommit his own baffled endeavours to eyes that saw everything, and a power that could open all doors. He chose the transept chapel from which Master Thomas’s coffin had been carried that morning, resealed into sanctity by the Mass sung for him. He had time, now, to kneel and wait, having busied himself thus far in anxious efforts like a man struggling up a mountain, when he knew there was a force that could make the mountain bow. He said a prayer for patience and humility, and then laid that by, and prayed for Emma, for the soul of "
― Ellis Peters , Saint Peter's Fair (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #4)
11
" Afterwards Brother Cadfael pondered many times over what followed, and wondered if prayer can even have a retrospective effect upon events, as well as influencing the future. What had happened had already happened, yet would he have found the same situation if he had not gone straight into the church, when Philip left him, with the passionate urge to commit to prayer the direction of his own efforts, which seemed to him so barren? It was a most delicate and complex theological problem, never as far as he knew, raised before, or if raised, no theologian had ventured to write on the subject, probably for fear of being accused of heresy. "
― Ellis Peters , Saint Peter's Fair (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #4)
16
" Cadfael always rose for Matins and Lauds not sleepy and unwilling, but a degree more awake than at any other time, as though his senses quickened to the sense of separateness of the community gathered here, to a degree impossible by daylight. The dimness of the light, the solidity of the enclosing shadows, the muted voices, the absence of lay worshippers, all contributed to his sense of being enfolded in a sealed haven, where all those who shared in it were his own flesh and blood and spirit, responsible for him as he for them, even some for whom, in the active and arduous day, he could feel no love, and pretended none. The burden of his vows "
― Ellis Peters , Saint Peter's Fair (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #4)
