Historical Novels

"The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head."

"They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burn phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawnbroached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below."

"Blood, he said. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing."

"What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death."

"He pointed with his left hand and she turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to her head and fired. [...] He took a skinning knife from his belt and stepped to where the old woman lay and took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her skull and ripped away the scalp."

"The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol enacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning."

"The cat simply disappeared. There was no blood or cry, it just vanished."

"All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds."

"You dont know me, do ye? he said. The kid spat and squinted up at him. I know ye, he said. I'd know your hide in a tanyard."

"La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote."

"In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head."

"I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you."

"When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."

"People see what they want to see."

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. [...] Oh my god, said the sergeant. A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts."

"...death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape."

"He prayed: Almighty god, if it aint too far out of the way of things in your eternal plan do you reckon we could have a little rain down here."

"The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night."

"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto."

"[...] words were said that could not be put right again [...] The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom."

"The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs."

"What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them."

"A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."

"Solitary, half mad, his eyes redrimmed as if locked in their cages with hot wires"

"Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay."

"His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. [...] The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man."

"I don’t remember what we talked about in the kitchen."

"Nor do I remember how I greeted Frau Schmitz."

"Perhaps I only became aware of all this some time later."

"I no longer remember when I first denied Hanna."

"I have them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed."

"While I have no memory of the lies I told my parents about the trip with Hanna, I do remember the price I had to pay to stay alone at home the last week of vacation."

"I don’t remember what I told my parents."

"Later I wondered if she had left the water in the tub because she knew I would come back."

"The memory that illuminates and fixes my first meetings with Hanna makes a single blur…I remember our meeting in those weeks as one single long meeting."

"Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? … Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?...Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily."

"I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together…Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do."

"I knew none of this—if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air."

"Years later it occurred to me that the reason I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, but the way she held herself and moved."

"Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind’s eye as she was then, she doesn’t have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it….I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty."

"I'm keen to know whether the next English King is going to be German or French."

"A quarter of a mile south of the dogleg in the road….the frontier of London could be discerned by the Wise in the Ways of Real Estate. The most infallible sign of which was that, here, the track leading to Black Mary’s Hole had been improved with a name, Coppice Row, devised to conjure forth, from the fevered brains of would-be buyers, phant’sies of a cozy and bucolic character, be they never so removed from Truth."

"“Charles White was asking me a lot of odd questions…. He is planning something—“ ”Oh, he planned it ages ago. Presently he is doing it. It is I who am planning something.” “A war?” “Much nastier: a Parliamentary inquiry.”"

"Sergeant Shaftoe was not the sort who would admit to being startled or impressed by anything, but at least he did not look bored or contemptuous — a signal achievement for Roger Comstock."

"Comstock permitted himself a dry chuckle. “You are a man of many words but few specifics. You’d do well in Parliament.” Shaftoe shrugged. “I’m old. Your hirelings, who broke me out of the Tower, they are young lads, and were moved greatly by each little happening. Ask them to relate the story to you, and you shall hear a yarn far longer and more diverting than any I would tell.” “And less strictly true, I suspect,” said Comstock."

"“Sergeant Shaftoe,” said the old man, “I do pity the Grim Reaper on the day that he shall finally come for you in earnest. I fear you’ll use him so roughly that he shall have to go on holiday for a fortnight.”"

"“Thank you, guv’nor,” the brewer said to the old man... “But I couldn’t possibly.” And he tossed the coin back… “If it was some other bloke in there, I’d take your money, guv. But this one’s on the house.” “You are a credit to your profession, sir.” Returned the old man, “as if it needed any.”"

"“Because though I have not done violence I have seen rather a lot of it. Not all of the men who employ it are stupid, or evil. Only most of them. The rest use it reluctantly, as a way, when all else has failed, of seizing the main chance. Thus you tonight. Your mother will understand this and get her equilibrium back. But like a man who imbibes tobacco-smoke, you have died a little death tonight. I do not recommend that you become addicted to it.”"

"“When you smoke your pipe, you feel an initial rush of stimulation, followed by a calmness, a steadying of the nerves. This is but a trace, a shadow, of nicotine poisoning. If you were cut with this dagger, that relaxation of the nerves would advance to the point where you would simply forget to breathe, and drown in air … every time you smoke tobacco, you are prefiguring your own death.” “Horrid … it makes me want to smoke something just to calm down.” “Mr. Hooke experimented with an herb called bhang that would cure what ails you — alas, it is harder to get.”"

"“Sir, my admiration for your work is mingled with wonder that a man of your age and dignity is out doing things like this.” Daniel turned to look him in the eye; and his creased face was grave and calm in the morning light. He looked nothing like the daft codger who had come to dinner yesterday evening and embarrassed the other English by dribbling wine down his shirt-front. “Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That’s how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”"