Historical Novelists

"Do you love your country? [...] This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor."

"The Soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The Soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces "pussy" in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between."

"Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this. When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleagured forces, is sufficiant, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory. This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse."

"Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can."

"There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight. [...] I was wrong."

"I believe him, Dienekes. He's so fucking stupid, this is just the way he would skrew it up."

"I approve of all you say, gentlemen. The fleet's needs are many and urgent. One, however, must take precedence. This item the men need before all, and we must get it for them without fail and without deferral. We must get the men a victory."

"This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield."

"I had always wondered what it felt like to die."

"I have always found the spear to be a rather inelegant weapon"

"Both men were aware of the imperative held by all warrior races to serve honor before survival."

"You have never tasted freedom friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel."

"If you think this is funny, wait 'till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical!"

"Just when you think that life is slowing down, magic happens. The universe sends you a message, like a tsvit paporot on your doorstep. The question is: what do you wish for?"

"I would add to my mother’s wisdom that the key to love is in the breath. You know you love a man when you can stand his breath in the morning after a night of drinking and cigarettes. When you can kiss him after he finishes a garlic and butter sandwich and still enjoy the feel of his lips. When he looks into your eyes, tells you he loves you—and the pickled herring and onions are stronger than his voice—yet you still smile. You still want to be close to him. Yes, then you have found love. My Baba used to say that the breath is a taste of the spirit. When two spirits recognize each other in memory and future, then love grows."

"Back home, these lessons were taught in songs and stories passed along by grandmothers, wise women who held a cherished place in the circle of community. I thought someday to take my place among them. But the war had broken the cycle and torn millions of people away from the bosoms of their mothers. We were forever searching to recapture all that we had lost … connections to blood, to bones, to earth. And connections resurface … refuse to be denied."

"Follow me on a journey into heaven and hell, past angels and devils, into the realm of dreams. That is where our souls go when we sleep, to meet up with our soul mate, to love without abandon, without regret. For in the morning we must return to life and all its painful illusions."

"If only the wind could reach inside me, wipe clean my heartache, my guilt, my confusion. If only the waves could wash away this heartache, this jealousy and rage, this guilt and sadness. If only the rocks could lend me their stability, their strength, so I might choose wisely. If only the sun could burn away my past, so I would not have to live with any regrets."

"By dancing we could remain in the moment. By dancing we could avoid talking, dwelling on the past, or thinking about the future. We were connected in a way that was neither threatening nor complicated; just circling and swaying, following the oldest rhythms of breath and heartbeat."

"Sometimes, if you stand very still in the shadows of those places, you can hear songs on the wind, whispers in the trees. That is why I travel."

"Generally, it is a question of the people. Particularly, in the present case, it is the question of the Konkani people—at home and abroad. The Konkani people just cannot afford to sit tight while communities all around strive with zeal for progress and honourable recognition; while Maharashtra on one side and Karnataka on the other side make their presence felt and their demands expressive. Emphatically, the Konkani people have a need to unite for uplifting the Konkan. These are the aspirations of all the Konkani speaking Indians. It is with these thoughts in mind, the Konkani people will be proud to hail the Konkani way of life. If the Konkani people give their support and cooperation in the way it is essential, there is no doubt that the Konkani way of life will strive to live up to the sterling idea it has set forth."

"When she saw the children jumping first upon one bare foot and then upon the other, she envied them and wished that she, too, could run barefooted for a little while. For a little while. She was a royal child. She knew that golden shoes pinch and there is no escaping them."

"I think hawking is the nearest thing to flying in this world. There you sit high up and poised light as air, the horse swift beneath you. You unhood your bird, let the jesses go and watch your falcon, its bells a-jingle, like some wild spirit take the air … and your own spirit goes with it."

"Nobody seemed to know where the King was. He was at Windsor choosing new furnishings for the little Queen's rooms; he was hunting at Eltham; he was at Leeds Castle; he was at Havering. He was here, he was there, restless as quicksilver. Certainly I never set eyes on him. I was disappointed. And yet I was relieved, too. It was common talk that the King's moods shifted this way and that you never knew what to expect."

"Why think of anything at all but the pretty, gentle child sitting high upon the white horse! So women holding up their children to see her pass cried blessings on her head, the easy blessings of a crowd, that may turn at any moment to curses. And there were wenches in plenty, who, seeing the little Queen in cloth of gold and the King at her side, handsome Richard, wished themselves, no doubt, in her place."

"Magic doesn't happen often — not once in a blue moon … I expect there isn't another magic ship like this one in the whole world."

"Earth and fire and water and air We solemnly promise, we solemnly swear Not a word, not a hint, not a sound to declare Earth and fire and water and air!"

"There is no magic when one no longer believes."

"Magic. Magic had happened to him. He knew it would one day. He had always believed in magic, even whe the others had laughed at him, laughed because he was the eldest and ought to know better."

"I was a lonely child though there were children in plenty on our land. But my nurse forbade me to play with them. She guarded my dignity; more than my mother, indeed, who being so great a lady took dignity for granted. But in any case there was little time for them to play. There was work for even the smallest upon our land; some of our peasants had run away, tempted by ever-rising wages. Wages fixed by law were certainly low; but, like many another ruined in the French wars, we had no money to pay a penny more than the law laid down. All over the country men were running away from their masters and the land lost as many laborers as by the Black Death itself."

"The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance."

"Many of the Hornblower books were superb examples of their craft, and Forester remains unequaled for dynamism of narrative and precision of encounter: his single ship actions are surely the best ever described."

"When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument."

""I did not ask for objections, but for comments, or helpful suggestions. I looked for more loyalty from you, Captain Hornblower." That made the whole argument pointless. If Leighton only wanted servile agreement there was no sense in continuing."

"I have…read it with a good deal of amusement and enjoyment. The latter is due, I suppose, entirely to the subject – for everyone likes to imagine what a man could do if he were a dictator or Pope, or Caliph; the amusement is mainly at the author's expence. The style is one of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I doubt if I ever saw so much pedantry combined with so much ignorance."

"He was a confidence-man, pauper, tutor, blackmailer, paedophile, translator – and author of seven novels and a number of short stories. Rolfe was a trickster whose failed life stank to himself as to the few friends whom he had and betrayed. But he was a fascinating figure: a bore, but also a pseudo-Borgian freak whose vindictiveness and paranoia have deservedly become legendary."

"He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror."

"Rolfe's vice was spiritual more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it had to be…If he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the Inferno."

"Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it."

"Pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired."

"He seems to have been a serpent of serpents in the bosom of all the nineties. That in itself endears him to one."

"Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties – French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time."

"He took the imperial hand and shook it in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English fashion."

"An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult."

"It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature."

"That cold white candent voice which was more caustic than silver nitrate and more thrilling than a scream."

"I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny." And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny."

"At fifteen years of age, when first my parents settled down in London (temporarily as they thought) I had never been in England, never had an English friend or English governess, or English tuition of any sort or kind. I did not speak one word of English. Then how did it all come about? Neo-Victorians and Neo-Georgians will put it down to destiny; others to predestination. I, in my humble way, put it down to the Will of God. And looking back on my long life and its many changes I can trace the links of my chain of life that began on the great plains of Hungary, continued through the heart of London, and find me now at this hour of writing this book in Monte Carlo jotting down all that I can remember of those links which led me one by one to the conception of my first literary work. If any one of those links had not been, if any turn of event in my life had been different, I would probably have ended my days in the country of my birth and known nothing of the happiness which comes from love, from the affection of friends (such as one meets in England) and from success in the work to which I devoted so many years of my life."

"The King's colours were white and black, which he always wore in honour of the Duchess of Valentinois, who was a widow. The Duke of Ferrara and his retinue had yellow and red. Monsieur de Guise's carnation and white. It was not known at first for what reason he wore those colours, but it was soon remembered that they were the colours of a beautiful young lady whom he had been in love with, while she was a maid, and whom he yet loved though he durst not show it. The Duke de Nemours had yellow and black; why he had them could not be found out: Madam de Cleves only knew the reason of it; she remembered to have said before him she loved yellow, and that she was sorry her complexion did not suit that colour. As for the Duke, he thought he might take that colour without any indiscretion, since not being worn by Madam de Cleves it could not be suspected to be hers."

"I giovani sentono i dolori più acerbamente dei vecchi: per questi l'uscita di sicurezza è più vicina."