Historical Novels

"We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he' — her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since."

"The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace."

"The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast: — 'THE TRUTH! at which Orlando woke. He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman."

"Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions' paws with swans' necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them, people lying in them improve them amazingly."

"Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust."

"While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace."

"Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation."

"At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it."

"For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attractions for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book leaning, none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing an to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality’ are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek ‘life’ that Orlando went among them not in quest of ‘reality’ that he left them."

"For the Philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabaptists), which is the only harbor, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

"He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "Theres Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" ... Shall you mind?"

"There was one more serious problem... they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids... they observed my icy blueness, but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. "He'll learn, Madam," Mary comforted Amina, "He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure." I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time."

"What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop, had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encyclopedia - even a whole language ..."

"No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time."

"The book that made me want to be a writer in the first place was Gone with the Wind—I read it and wanted to create a whole world out of words, too."

"there was a time when a new novel came out — let's take Saul Bellow — and it was a public event. And really, it wasn't just an elitist hobby. I remember — this goes way, way back into my early childhood — when Gone with the Wind was published, the world was whirling around this novel. I remember walking to school and seeing shopkeepers sitting outside their shops reading Gone with the Wind. This was an event. It changed people's minds. Maybe I have a yearning for that, though I don't see it would ever happen again. On the other hand, didn't we see that with Downton Abbey? So maybe it isn't all lost."

"During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. 'Somehow, I considered it prophetic,' wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland's fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. 'Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,' a young fighter pilot recalled, 'We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn't believe that something bad could really happen.' When artillery lieutenant Jan Karski received his mobilisation order on 25 August, his sister waned against burdening himself with too many clothes. 'You aren't going to Siberia,' she said, 'We'll have you on our hands again within a month.'"

"In this day and age it is impossible to conquer the state through a bloody uprising. But we can do something else, something which we are doing, which is to simply change things by our presence". He jabs at the air with his fingers: "We're saying: I'm here; I was never part of Gone With the Wind, I was never an intended slave, I was never a happy darkie, I have a right to live on my terms, now get out of my way!"

"She was seeing through Rhett's eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend — the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeat."

"Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage."

"These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees."

"Hardships make or break people."

"There ain’t nothin’ that walks can lick us, any more than it could lick him, not Yankees nor Carpetbaggers nor hard times nor high taxes nor even downright starvation. But that weakness that’s in our hearts can lick us in the time it takes to bat your eye."

"I cannot understand why I did not desert. It was all the purest insanity. But it’s in one’s blood. Southerners can never resist a losing cause."

"It isn't that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art. Maybe it wasn't so to everyone. I know that now. But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living. I belonged in that life. I was a part of it. And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion. I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams."

"A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, we Southerners did think we were gods."

"And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well."

"In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out. At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung."

"Before the war there had been few cotton factories, woolen mills, arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland, a fact of which all Southerners were proud. The South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such low callings."

"“The trouble with most of us Southerners,” continued Rhett Butler, “is that we either don’t travel enough or we don’t profit enough by our travels.... I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines — all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month.""

"Hell is other people's fantasies: every saga requires at least one descent into Jahannum, and I followed Picture Singh into the inky negritude of the Club, holding an infant son in my arms."

"It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi's younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father's death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything."

"There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents."

"Children are vessels where adults pour their poison."

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

"You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive."

"Mon père... c’était un homme humble et héroïque qui a glorieusement servi la République et la France, qui a été grand dans la plus grande histoire que les hommes aient jamais faite, qui a vécu un quart de siècle au bivouac, le jour sous la mitraille et sous les balles, la nuit dans la neige, dans la boue, sous la pluie, qui a pris deux drapeaux, qui a reçu vingt blessures, qui est mort dans l’oubli et dans l’abandon, et qui n’a jamais eu qu’un tort, c’est de trop aimer deux ingrats, son pays et moi!"

"Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness. If you delve into Les Misérables in French, you cannot fail to first recognize, and then, hopefully, to thrive in, the somewhat stilted nature of Victor Hugo’s language."

"Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange, La chose simplement d’elle-même arriva, Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va."

"Cette pierre est toute nue. On n’a songé en la taillant qu’au nécessaire de la tombe, et l’on n’a pris d’autre soin que de faire cette pierre assez longue et assez étroite pour couvrir un homme.'On n’y lit aucun nom."

"La nuit était sans étoiles et profondément obscure. Sans doute, dans l’ombre, quelque ange immense était debout, les ailes déployées, attendant l’âme."

"Les forêts où l’on a passé avec son enfant, les arbres où l’on s’est promené, les couvents où l’on s’est caché, les jeux, les bons rires de l’enfance, c’est de l’ombre. Je m’étais imaginé que tout cela m’appartenait. Voilà où était ma bêtise. Ces Thénardier ont été méchants. Il faut leur pardonner. Cosette, voici le moment venu de te dire le nom de ta mère. Elle s’appelait Fantine. Retiens ce nom-là: — Fantine. Mets-toi à genoux toutes les fois que tu le prononceras. Elle a bien souffert. Elle t’a bien aimée. Elle a eu en malheur tout ce que tu as en bonheur. Ce sont les partages de Dieu. Il est là-haut, il nous voit tous, et il sait ce qu’il fait au milieu de ses grandes étoiles. Je vais donc m’en aller, mes enfants. Aimez-vous bien toujours. Il n’y a guère autre chose que cela dans le monde: s’aimer."

"J’écrivais tout à l’heure à Cosette. Elle trouvera ma lettre. C’est à elle que je lègue les deux chandeliers qui sont sur la cheminée. Ils sont en argent; mais pour moi ils sont en or, ils sont en diamant; ils changent les chandelles qu’on y met, en cierges. Je ne sais pas si celui qui me les a donnés est content de moi làhaut. J’ai fait ce que j’ai pu."

"Ce n’est rien de mourir; c’est affreux de ne pas vivre."

"La mort est un bon arrangement. Dieu sait mieux que nous ce qu’il nous faut. Que vous soyez heureux, que monsieur Pontmercy ait Cosette, que la jeunesse épouse le matin, qu’il y ait autour de vous, mes enfants, des lilas et des rossignols, que votre vie soit une belle pelouse avec du soleil, que tous les enchantements du ciel vous remplissent l’âme, et maintenant, moi qui ne suis bon à rien, que je meure, il est sûr que tout cela est bien. Voyez-vous, soyons raisonnables, il n’y a plus rien de possible maintenant, je sens tout à fait que c’est fini."

"Oh oui, défends-moi de mourir. Qui sait? j’obéirai peut-être. J’étais en train de mourir quand vous êtes arrivés. Cela m’a arrêté, il m’a semblé que je renaissais."

"Cosette, entends-tu? il en est là ! il me demande pardon. Et sais-tu ce qu’il m’a fait, Cosette? Il m’a sauvé la vie. Il a fait plus. Il t’a donnée à moi. Et après m’avoir sauvé et après t’avoir donnée à moi, Cosette, qu’a-t-il fait de lui-même? il s’est sacrifié. Voilà l’homme. Et, à moi l’ingrat, à moi l’oublieux, à moi l’impitoyable, à moi le coupable, il me dit: Merci! Cosette, toute ma vie passée aux pieds de cet homme, ce sera trop peu. Cette barricade, cet égout, cette fournaise, ce cloaque, il a tout traversé pour moi, pour toi, Cosette! Il m’a emporté à travers toutes les morts qu’il écartait de moi et qu’il acceptait pour lui. Tous les courages, toutes les vertus, tous les héroïsmes, toutes les saintetés, il les a! Cosette, cet homme-là, c’est l’ange!'Chut! chut! dit tout bas Jean Valjean. Pourquoi dire tout cela?'Mais vous! s’écria Marius avec une colère où il y avait de la vénération, pourquoi ne l’avez-vous pas dit? C’est votre faute aussi. Vous sauvez la vie aux gens, et vous le leur cachez! Vous faites plus, sous prétexte de vous démasquer, vous vous calomniez. C’est affreux... La vérité, c’est toute la vérité; et vous ne l’avez pas dite. Vous étiez monsieur Madeleine, pourquoi ne pas l’avoir dit? Vous aviez sauvé Javert, pourquoi ne pas l’avoir dit? Je vous devais la vie, pourquoi ne pas l’avoir dit?"

"Vous êtes un infâme! vous êtes un menteur, un calomniateur, un scélérat. Vous veniez accuser cet homme, vous l’avez justifié; vous vouliez le perdre, vous n’avez réussi qu’à le glorifier. Et c’est vous qui êtes un voleur! Et c’est vous qui êtes un assassin! Je vous ai vu, Thénardier Jondrette, dans ce bouge du boulevard de l’Hôpital. J’en sais assez sur vous pour vous envoyer au bagne, et plus loin même, si je voulais."