historical-fiction

Ain__ nothing too serious. Even death is a joke on the old devil, if we are living for the Lord.

... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.

Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I'd come around. Sooner or later, I'd fall in line.

Sunset encroached upon daylight like a powder burst from the mouth of a crimson cannon__range and gold ribbons shot forth to wage a battle against the clouds. The western horizon was obscured by a glow like a living thing.

Oh, she's still here;she's just not as pretty... anymore.

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist."(Voltaire)

Jennings is too tough and honest a writer to let anyone off her moral hook, even her hero.

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

Where are these fucking guns coming from?

Children worked in the mills: "I will always believe that children are designed for green meadows and play, not for factories and cotton dust.

Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin - that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

I could faintly smell the ocean. I imagined being one of the old oak trees standing there swaying in the wind and braving all sorts of weather. I pondered what they had seen in the past and what they might see in the future

I was too far away to hear what was said but I saw in Val__ eyes the same fear that I had once known and could well guess at Lucas_ unthinking remark.

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure

THE FIGHTING IN THE PEACH ORCHARD AT GETTYSBURGPROLOGUE"The same young men who crowded each other as they faced the recruiters' tables now crowded each other as they died.

How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.