Quotes from Ann Wroe

According to Augustine, "Eve borrowed sin from the devil and wrote a bill and provided a surety, and the interest on the debt was heaped upon posterity. . . . She wrote the bill when she reached out her hand to the forbidden apple." And in the end, adds the Golden Legend, "Christ took this bill and nailed it to the cross.

Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.

It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.

His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.

Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, his head bent to the vibrating string and his lips slightly open, breathing quickly, as over the body of a lover.

We imagine we are free agents, but possibly do not realize how steadily Fate moves us along the road we think we have chosen.

But godhead gradually slipped away from him, leaving only a sense of election and the power, through his music, to to change landscapes, seasons, hearts.

Pilate also became, in a way, the first priest of the Eucharist of Christ. Christ offered the bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood, but Pilate offered Christ himself. He took him, showed him to the people, proclaimed him and broke him.

in Socrates' words, he had committed sin by failing to know what was false and what was true.

Because of my underpants?" Ivan asks. "Chiefly because of Pontius Pilate." [from Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita ]

our modern day when we can neither endure our vices, nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

THERE IS NO BEATING THESE PEOPLE, though they seem beatable.

They went in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but they could not quite manage to be open-minded; for once on the mountain, strange fears began to assail them. Behind their bravely rational and humanist front, they were still men of the Middle Ages, and their climb became a metaphor for the struggle of Renaissance Europe to get past old ghosts.

There is never any hint of the crowd splitting into factions; the Gospel writers give them one loud hectoring voice. Some commentators suppose they did this to spread the supposed guilt of the Jews evenly and universally; there were no dissenters.

It was probably a coin of Tiberius with, around the edge, the words TI[BERIVS] CAESAR DIVI AVG[VSTI] F[ILIVS], "Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus," another son of a god;