Historical Fiction Quotes - Page 3

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."She tried to smile once more and expired.

Victor Hugo

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

Lee Strauss

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

Nadifa Mohamed

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”Patricia Briggs.

Demetra Angelis Foustanellas

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

Laura Morelli

It's history as it should have happened. It's history made better.

R.A. McCandless

'Are our gods better than Olaf's god?' Alfdis laughed. 'That's a silly question. Gods are gods. Our gods have been with us since the beginning of the world. We sacrifice to them, and they aid us when they see fit. Other people have their own gods and their own ways of dealing with them. That's their concern.'

James Erich

Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have. But you can't eat a leather belt like it's a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days.

Lisa See

Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.

Elizabeth Graver

Even still, it wasn't over. For if a battle could be won so easily, men would soon forget its horrors and clamor for it all the more. War would come more than once or twice a generation. Easy victories would produce men who were struck dumb with their own unbelievably improbable successes. Such men wold begin to think they had devised not the superior tactic, but rather the supreme tactic at winning

Jason Born

Septimus grinned. "It's not coins I seek. I seek the power of Hercules.

Jason Born

The great Sugambrian shrugged. "I did. I supposed you've proven your worth. But no man should have to kill his own father. I should know.

Jason Born

But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive. from 'The Fallen Kings.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Her entire life, she’d been told sin was wrong, a black and white interpretation of what is evil and what is holy in the world—colored like a priest’s robe and collar—but she never believed it to be true. Sin was colorful: scarlet like rose blood, azure like skin deprived oxygen, violet as bruises, jade as rot; a colorful contradiction to the darkness and blinding light all are taught sin and holiness to be.

Madi Merek

...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...

Robert Harris

I'd rather make a good run than a bad stand.

Margaret Walker

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

G. M. Trevelyan

Tastes change, Cherie. I find the older I get the more I like to be reminded of my youth.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

War’s all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!But men have not yet changed.

Shauna Singh Baldwin

What do we do if we come across trouble, sir?' Cahill asked, slapping at a fly. 'As much as I enjoy giving the rebel turds a walloping, it should be down to the Militia to keep the buggers in check.''They are doing their job,' Mullone said, glancing at a free-standing Celtic Cross that had once been a prominent feature beside the road, but was now strangled with weeds, besieged with dark moss and deeply pitted with age.'If you call plundering, fighting and torture work, sir.''You don't have much faith in the peace talks then, Seán?''No, sir. There's more chance of me taking holy orders and becoming the Pope than there is of peace,' Cahill replied. 'The negotiations that spout from the politicians mouths are nothing but wet farts.

David Cook

Love, I think, is by necessity constructed of a ladder of lies you climb together.

Kimberly Elkins

Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx--once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness--might Science yet summon him back?

Ian Weir

I offer you your life, friend, and recommend you take it.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

Atty’s eyes rested on Darby with all the subtlety of a dog watching his food bowl being filled!

Tricia Murphy

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.

Upton Sinclair

Brother," Artemis chided. "You do not help my hunters. You do not look at, talk to, or flirt with my Hunters. And you do not call them sweetheart.

Rick Riordan

This is the average age of my Hunters, and all young maidens for whom I am patron, before they go astray.""Go astray?""Grow up. Become smitten with boys. Become silly, preoccupied, insecure.

Rick Riordan

Lightening flashed again and again but above the shriek of the wind and the pounding hail they never heard the thunder.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

Dead man shouldn’t have no fears. Makes his passing easier.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

What one of us wants we all want. You a man of the earth as you are, you ought to have known we hunt in packs. And now I come to finish you.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

She ran the harder and zagged more erratically, and in the wreckage left from the hurricane the girl misjudged her path and ran straight into the old well. She didn’t even scream.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

You want a sermon? Jesus died and resurrected and then run off to Heaven to leave us sinners here. Amen.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

The oaks along the ridge were writhing like tortured epileptics in the winds, and she could make out through the thick rain a cascade of water like a cataract come roiling down the inside slope toward her; a vast arching spray exploded bright against the dark sky as the Gulf slammed over the chenier.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

So you do enjoy my lovemaking?"She lifted an eyebrow. "If you can't tell that, sir, you are blind and deaf and probably stupid."If he'd been a peacock, he would have been strutting about, displaying his feathers.

Sabrina Jeffries

You are a woman born of secrets and sadness. It will either destroy your future or lead you to greatness. A handsome gentleman with eyes like the sky and hair like a raven's wing will come into your life. If you let him, he will become the hand of your vengeance. If you let him,he will shatter your heart.

Sabrina Jeffries

I’m not trying to start an argument with you,” William assured him. “I suppose I don’t know what it’s like to be a true revolutionary, though I think I’ve held some…similar…ideals. At times. Thought I could change things, if I fought hard enough.”“What did you try to change?”“Myself, in hopes that it would change others’ opinions of me.”“That is a bit more selfish than what we aspire to,” Luis clarified.William shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, I pressed others to change as well. Guess I just didn’t fight hard enough for any of it.

T.L. Walker

Not strictly one of mine, but worth repeating! A very forceful old lady in these parts, when referring to the eight novels of the Angel Mountain Saga,was heard to say: "You know them books by that fellow Brian John? If I was you I wouldn't believe a single word. Take it from me. It's lies -- all lies!

Brian John

I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.

Hilary Mantel

A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. “That’s Robert Speer,” one said. “Something like that. He’s our man.

Marge Piercy

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Hilary Mantel

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

Hilary Mantel

She was as lovely as ever, my Jessie Anne. I paused for a moment, taking her beauty in, laying up this vision of her in the deepest and most secret place of my mind, allowing the sight of her to renew my spirit. I stepped slowly down to the platform, never allowing my gaze to drift from her. Jessie Anne was looking toward the front of the car, and it was a moment or two before she turned and spotted me.The bright and hopeful smile I had so expected and longed for darkened, just for a moment to be sure, but long enough for me to recognize a fleeting glimpse of shock and anguish, possibly of horror. No longer did she see the man she had known, the man she had given her life to. No, she saw me for the man I truly was, the man with blood on his hands.

Karl A. Bacon

Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and took out his Bible, a gift from his father, Captain Benjamin K. Matthews, on the the day he had ridden off to war. Aaron opened to the Psalms, intending to read, but his eyes were heavy and closed against his will. O death, where is thy sting? Pastor Blackwell had told him that death had no power over him, but he sure felt that sting now. O grave, where is thy victory? How much longer would it be? Just four miles from home. Would Mama ever know?Shiloh, the place of peace. Good ground to die on. Holy ground.

Karl A. Bacon

It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

James Jones

Sapphires for my bride-to-be and a severed head for the king my brother," said Duke Richard cheerfully. "As St Paul pointed out, gifts may vary but the spirit is the same. In the present instance, a spirit of goodwill.

Reay Tannahill

When we decided to move West, I worried about how to defend my family and my stock from Indians, but I never worried about inheriting one!”--from Prairie Grace when Georgia's father Thomas realizes gravely ill Gray Wolf has been left at their doorstep

Marilyn Bay Wentz

The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been.

Luo Guanzhong

Some day...as you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.

James Jones

Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. “Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people.”--from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans

Marilyn Bay Wentz

Of all the things I dislike, I hate women worst.

James Jones

Did you ever hear the one about how every living woman dies three times? Once when she is seduced of her virginity, once when she is seduced of her freedom (I believe they call it marriage), and once when she is seduced of her husband.

James Jones

...homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.

James Jones

You’ll likely always have some reason or other to hang onto that girl. You just want her cause she was married to your son, and I understand that, he was a friend to me like a brother, near the only family I ever knew, and I miss him almost as much as you. But I need me a woman.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

All of my books are acts of subversion disguised as historical fiction.

Kelly Gardiner

The greatest gift you can give an author is turning the page.

Richard E Valdez

I will not live to see you grow to womanhood, so I have written my story for you, my beloved grandchild, so that you can know the truth of what happened here so many years ago. I'm sure that in the course of your life you have wonderd about whispered conversations that stop when you are near. Wondered too about the knowing looks cast at you and your family. I am equally sure that your father has never found it in his heart to tell you the truth you are about to read. I beg you not to be angry with hime for withholding the truth from you. He has suffered greatly for my sins.

Susan Boles

As in all great cataclysmic events, men are forced to show their true colours. Some will achieve the status of legend for their courage, brilliance and dedication; some will possess all the same qualities unacknowledged; others will be plodders doing their best; and there will be those who will be what they have always been -- sewer rats.

Anne Rouen

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Historical Fiction Quotes - Page 3

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