Historical Fiction Quotes - Page 7

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

I'm learning not to hope for what I can't control...

Never bet your money on another man's game.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

lightning thief was good but the sea of monsters is better and has more action!

I decided to write the book I wanted to read

David A. Lottes

You’re a lady. It’s written all over you, but the West doesn’t forgive any woman-unless she’s got a man.

Liliana Shelbrook

Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

Patrick O'Brian

There are some things you never say good-bye to

Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.

What, did you think," she asked, laughing as he struggled up the bank, "that I, a Gaulish maiden, could not swim?" "I did not think anything about it," Malchus said; "I saw you pushed in and followed without thinking at all." Although they imperfectly understood each other's words the meaning was clear; the girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked frankly up in his face. "I thank you," she said, "just the same as if you had saved my life. You meant to do so, and it was very good of you, a great chief of this army, to hazard your life for a Gaulish maiden. Clotilde will never forget.

I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

Think ere you speak

I want you forever. I will always be with you. I will always love you. I will love, honor, and cherish you for all eternity.

Katrina D. Miller

Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.

(The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)

Nancy B. Brewer

There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?

Madeline Miller

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

Hermann Rauschning

The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

Neal Stephenson

He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot.We were about to become cigarettes.

True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.

Alexandre Dumas

Roger speaking to Brianna: It's too important. You don't forget having a dad."You do remember your father?"No. I remember yours.

Jealousy is nothing but a fear of being abandoned

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?

Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one’s burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressing down upon them, the way the sea pressed down upon the creatures of the deep.

Kathy-Diane Leveille

I had turned to leave and he had called after me. “Miss Maria, I kin no other woman who could be wearing men’s trousers and be dripping such as ye are and look quite so lovely. It’s a right shame your mother is marrying you off to that great sot!”I had turned to call back to him, “I doubt very much we will have to worry about that after today!

It seemed ironic to her that women were considered far too meek for the morbidity of war, and yet a child could give their life in a battle they did not even understand.

Katlyn Charlesworth

‎"He smiled at me and I felt the tenderness only a daughter could feel.

Nancy B. Brewer

It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse

Nancy B. Brewer

He is dressed in a long, white robe and in his hand is a white cap. I draw up as he passes down the hall; he does not see me. Shortly I hear a horse leaving. There is much I do not know about him, but tonight I know one of his secrets. He is a midnight rider.

Nancy B. Brewer

I stop to brace myself against the walls, which are painted with the fingerprints of family.

Nancy B. Brewer

Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.

Nancy B. Brewer

Before I disappear behind the door, I stop and turn around to look at him.

Nancy B. Brewer

According to Robert, his friend Moses was a soldier in the first war, as he described it. He fought Indians and soldiers in red coats.

Nancy B. Brewer

The sun had just slipped behind the trees and evening cast its dark, smoky shadow.

Nancy B. Brewer

I can hear my steps echo as I follow him to the end of the hall. The door to the small closet under the steps is standing ajar. He closes the door and latches it.

Nancy B. Brewer

It was a warm and natural feeling to be there. We were not black or white people. We were just people bound together by love and understanding. As I walked out of that church, I felt like I had rediscovered my inner peace.

Nancy B. Brewer

The pages that follow will be our journey of the life we built together here in Concord, North Carolina. These pages will reveal fragments from the past and events that occurred along the way.

Nancy B. Brewer

The curtains were not yet drawn and with the moonlight spreading across the room, I could see clearly. I undressed and slipped a soft cotton gown over my naked body. I pulled the blanket off the foot of my bed, covered my shoulders and wa...lked out on the balcony. The cool night air blowing through my hair served as a reminder that only a hint of summer remained in this year of 1860.

Nancy B. Brewer

Moonlight does things to a street scene that no other natural or man-made phenomenon can effect. People walk slower, their smiles lingering on contended faces. Horses that usually move along fast enough to stir up the dust off the street plod lazily in the clear, cool night. And in dark corners where people forget to look, the goons come out.

I have lived recklessly, gambled my income away at the horse races, gone whoring, have been more drunk than sober, beaten men to a pulp with my hands, have had a man’s nose cut off for insulting my father and have been indebted to villains more times than I care to say. But, I do not want to live like this anymore. I want a quiet life with a good woman who will care and love me – not for being the Duke of Monmouth, but for me, Jemmy.

Today’s breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare.

Nancy B. Brewer

I know not by what power I am drawn to you, but it is as a moth is drawn to the flame, and I cannot fight it, I must be consumed.

Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.

Nancy B. Brewer

She is a jewel far richer than a mountain of coin could bring!

Whenever doubts become a crime... whenever parents become afraid their children might turn them in; a country where the power of the government is mired inextricably with the jurisdiction and the executive, where you have three secret polices spying on the population and people disappear without a word, that is not my country... My country and Nazi Germany, those are two very different places. And I dearly hope I’ll live to see the day when the latter one falls.

Osiris Brackhaus

Like the magnolia tree, She bends with the wind,Trials and tribulation may weather her, Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms, See her standing there, like steel, With her roots forever buried,Deep in her Southern soil.

Nancy B. Brewer

I am afraid of him now. The one I love most in the world.

Don't you understand brother? I want to find a love...that will free me from this love...

You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be...[he kisses her]...MINE...

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

Rafael Sabatini

Keep the guests company, and mind your asses! Stay out of the hall before my chamber!

Sai Marie Johnson

If you have found a woman who can stir both body and spirit, sir, do not give her up lightly. Do not. The alternatives can be damnably complicated. [Joseph Warren]

She gently bit his bottom lip, his ear. Worked her way down his body until she reached the inside of his thigh, then bit hard, breaking the skin, drawing blood. "My mark," she said, looking up at him. "Now you'll go back to your wife with my mark.

Dominique Wilson

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths.As it creaked up, Blackadder said, "That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

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