Historical Fiction Quotes - Page 11

He searched his mind for something more to say, something to take away her pain, but he could find nothing. There were no words to ease such a pain. He knew because the ache in his heart was as great as hers.

All the carriages filed out in single file but in a fashion that seemed to mean that they were competing against each other. The only sound that could be heard for a while was the pounding of the horses’ hooves and the squeal and groan of the wheels against the road. Their hooves kicked up dirt, creating a storm of dust.tOnce the miniature storm and the sound of galloping horses subsided, I could only see one last person. He glared up at me and mouthed, “Next time.” Christopher dug his boots into Dawn’s muscled flank. She reared up and broke into a gallop through the sparse forest, heading for escape. The last trace of them was the particles of floating dust, bright like floating fire.

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

Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days."--Abigail Whimble, Return to the Outer Banks House

Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.

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

The typewriter is indeed my passport into a world otherwise barred to me and my kind.

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

How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.

Cyrus is the meat and potatoes of my life, but Prudence was a cupcake I could enjoy just for the sheer sweetness of being with her.

He speaks in that strange sports talk, telling me about the start of the new season and asks if I follow baseball.tNo. I really don’t.tHe assures me if I stay in town long enough I will become a baseball fan. It’s a requirement of living in St. Louis. Everyone is a Cardinal’s fan.t“Loyal,” he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.

Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).

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?

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become." -Steve Jobs

Ann Boleyn...a Renaissance Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress.

Criminal activity exploded throughout the city – thugs multiplied by the thousands. Without fear of rebuke, there was nothing to stop them. It is the ultimate penalty that comes with tolerating the intolerant.

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.

The moment was all we truly had: a succession of moments, a triumphal march of them, to create a life beyond compare.

And then I knew that despite all the pain and hard work all of us had gone through, despite the sadness and anger we felt, in the end, everything was going to be fine.tBut I did not know when the end was, or if it was even near.tBut that did not matter.tI preferred to look towards it in anticipation rather than worry about it. One new day equalled to one new adventure. And right now, I still had plenty of days left in my life. So I did not decide to sit down and plan out my life.tInstead, I decided to sit back, relax, and see where life would take me.

Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America's founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whips upon their backs. Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?

Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.

A little truth seasons a lie like salt.

Readers will be swept up by the drama and fast pace of this powerful debut novel.” Reading Today Online, International Reading Association

¡Ay, las faldas!” (“Oh, the skirts!”) he sighed, shaking his head and winking with a mischievous smile. While admitting women were his “Achilles heel,” Antonio, as many young men of the times did, also disclaimed responsibility, as though he had no control over his behavior or desires. Loving the opposite sex was “the natural thing to do for a man,” he thought.

Anyone young, famous and beautiful who dies young is forever frozen in time and fascinating to all of us.

Through enjoyment we endure.

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.

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

Messages continued to arrive from the Earl of Warwick, urging Londoners to hold firm for King Harry. Marguerite d'Anjou and her son were expected to land at any time, while from St Albans, Edward sent word that Harry of Lancaster was to be considered a prisoner of state. At that, John Stockton, the Mayor of London, contracted a diplomatic virus and took to his bed.

The tall, thin serious man strode in, his dark cloak billowing so dramatically it threatened to extinguish the lamp flame with its draught. He advanced like a malevolent shadow consuming the dim orange light, filling the room with a presence almost more than human.

He woke up to knocks on his door. “Just a minute!” he said out loud. “I’m coming!”He got up and straightened himself as he opened the door.“Besi!” he said, overcome with emotion.He held her and never let go.

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

I’m not only my father’s daughter, but also a daughter of the nation he founded. And protecting both is what I’ve always done.

The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.

There is always hope for a reprieve, my friend,” Stielow said. “You have to get the governor to pardon you if the courts fail on you. This is an unlikely thing, although possible. The last thing you hold on to ‘til the last second is hope. Hope is what keeps us doomsmen sane, for the most part. A miracle.

I intend to marry Michael, and squander all his money and run his life, and make sure he never again consorts with wicked women or gambles with licentious men. I promise I will henpeck him until he has no life beyond what I allow him, and when we die, I will lie in his arms through all eternity.

The engorged moon hung full and low in the sky like a yellow skull. Misshapen clouds stretched across the floating orb with elongated hands and bony fingers grasping. As they neared the docks, the gas lamps grew fewer and the streets gloomier. The cobblestones blackened as they passed the deserted brickfields. Bottle-shaped kilns spat their outrage with orange tongues of fire into the cooling air. Mangy dogs snarled in hunger and wandering sea-gulls screamed their displeasure at the hansom’s passage.

I opened my eyes and watched the water stream past me. I let out some of my air and gazed at the cascade of silver bubbles dancing up to the surface.

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

Papa was our strength and the very fiber that wove our family together. He was our foundation and our rock, but even rocks, break, given enough stress.

I felt so much older now, so much more responsible. I guess that there were some positive outcomes: I knew more things than usual, and I knew that I really could accomplish anything and everything. But sometimes, all a fifteen-year-old girl wants is to stop growing. She wants time to slow down and eventually stand still where she can be young and inexperienced forever. Sometimes, she simply wants to remain a child.

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

Exile might satisfy the anger of the living, but it did not appease the dead.

Anything from Kipling

This building fool could only be Bess of Hardwicke, a woman whose name is seldom seen in print without the word “redoubtable” in front of it. I wondered if anyone ever called her redoubtable to her face. I redoubted it.

What Mrs. Schuyler is saying," General Schuyler added, "is that it is the Schuylers who would be honored by a union woth so brilliant and noble a personage as Colonel Hamilton.

Then the vulture swooped down and away, racing the LeTort spring to the Conodoguinet Creek from there to the Susquehanna river and from there to the sea. Same river my ancestors took to reach the places where they hunted and farmed and buried their dead.

The rural, mid-19th-century dialect, coupled with the author's interest in ethnobotany, roots the story deeply in the houses, forests, gardens, and even streambeds of antebellum Virginia. –School Library Journal

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

God wanted him to go to Him with his deepest needs, to stop looking elsewhere, so that he could be made whole again.

It is one of the great arts of the human soul," Ezekiel said to himself. Her hand on the door, Quincy shifted and looked back at her uncle's profile. "What is?""Staying with someone. Companionship is one of the great arts of the human soul.

It's their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast.

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.

There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys.

Her heart now pounding, a strange feeling of combined fear and happiness invaded her. She took a deep breath. Her lungs filled with fresh air. An invigorating rush of electricity all over her body overcame her. “So, is this how falling in love feels?” she thought.She knew the answer.

To order a wife by mail seemed strange to him indeed; so strange he could only open the letters in the confidential cloak of night, undisturbed by even the servants..." Lord Hartford's thoughts at the prospect of reading letters in response to his advertisement for a mail order bride in "To Find a Duchess

Great job, you just executed Ben Franklin! - Otto Ray

I have never learned to hate. Don't let my first lesson come from you.

That is our Shield Ring, our last stronghold; not the barrier fells and the totter-moss between, but something in the hearts of men.

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]