Historical Fiction Quotes

The rain landed on my skin with a barely audible patter and changed the tempo of its repetitive dance, letting the wind change its course and angle. The cold soon seeped through my dress and into my bones. An iris from my garland fell in my lap.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

I took my friend’s hand as she helped me up. With our hands still linked and our flower crowns tangled in our hair, we danced, laughing with joy, through the rain and towards the school, the lightning showing us our path with its powerful light.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

Making friends is not a big deal. Replacing me with them after talking to them for only one bloody day is a big deal.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run- Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, And-which is more-you'll be a man my son.

~ Rudyard Kipling

This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman's journey north was merely the beginning.

~ Jeffrey Whittam

People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening

~ Chris Cleave

No one lives long in a war. I don't want to lose you as well.

~ Sanchit Gupta

...Prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think, how sweet, how fine, how good this is... and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams... Prophecy will bite your prick off everytime

~ George R.r. Martin

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.

~ Monica Hesse

The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..

~ J.g. Farrell

I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.

~ T.s. Wieland

History is about ordinary people living their ordinary lives, just as we do today, while all around the world is changing. It makes heroes out of some people and victims out of others.

~ Vicky Adin

It is amazing what a woman can do if only she ignores what men tell her she can't.

~ Carol K. Carr

How things change,’ I say, ‘how strange that, even when all is lost, we can still find beauty in simple things.

~ Judith Arnopp

The human heartIs unknowable.But in my birthplaceThe flowers still smellThe same as always.

~ Rumer Godden

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.

~ Natasha Pulley

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.

~ Gary Inbinder

Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.

~ Kellyn Roth

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

~ Lauren Willig

Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it.

~ Oscar Wilde

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

~ A.j.p. Taylor

Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive,” says Ora.

~ Shaune Bordere

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “a distillation of rumor,” or, as Napoleon said, “a set of lies generally agreed upon

~ James Alexander Thom

she was like the merlin in pursuit of its airborne quarry, perhaps the snow bunting or a small meadow pipit; the avian prey is nimble but so is the predatory merlin with its inexhaustible stamina and unparalleled agility – round and round it chases the pipit, and the two flying at speeds almost impossible for the observer to follow.

~ Gregory Figg

Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volkempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies.Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God.

~ Anthony Doerr

George dutifully dusted the marks from the expensive rug and retired to the kitchen to await a grave and disapproving Collins, wishing with all of his boyish heart that he had applied for the stables. Cleaning stalls had to be beneficial exercise, and surely one must become accustomed to the smells...eventually.

~ Sarah Brazytis

The written word is the greatest sacred documentation.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know... M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met

~ M.m. Bennetts

As the tension between the Protestants and the Church of Rome intensified, so did the desire for a third way among dissenting groups. Soon a new group emerged, though in some senses it was also an old group—one that felt it could trace its origins all the way back to the New Testament. Known collectively as the Radical Reformation, these persecuted groups often advocated a nonviolent ethic, the separation of church and state, and a desire for both personal and corporate holiness. The ideas of these radicals spread through Europe, and over the years the Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, and to a lesser degree the Covenanters and Quakers, emerged or were influenced by this movement.

~ David Holdsworth

I am not a twenty-two-year-old boy; I am not a besotted fool. If you think to jilt me, think again. For I will not turn tail and run the other way as he did, oh no. I will find you, and I will drag you to the altar on your back if need be, no matter how you might be screaming. No matter how scandalous it might be.

~ Brenda Joyce

You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.

~ Mary Balogh

Life's temptations have the purpose of putting our spiritual integrity to the test. To yield to them, however, gives one a precarious and tormented satisfaction. But the worst temptations are those we give in to without getting anything in return except for the brutal discovery of our weakness.

~ Paolo Maurensig

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

~ Susan Carroll

A twinge of fear entered Gwenwhyfar’s heart. It was the first she had heard of the sea farms lying in the path of danger. She wondered what had befallen a different Norseman of her acquaintance. Had her poor bodyguard, Finn, perished in one of those raids?

~ Jennifer Mckeithen

I stood at the grassy edge and tentatively dipped my toe into the water. I watched the ripple spread and break the perfect reflection before composing itself. The ripple then rushed towards a mass of rocks to one side.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

She was merely an actress who had been forced to perform her part on stage without fully knowing her lines. She was not real.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I was nearly asleep, I could recognise her. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she was upset. Whether she was upset that she had nearly killed me or that she had let me get away, I was unsure. Then she turned around and walked to join the other silhouettes standing in a group farther back. Now I could not see which one was Rose – they were all joint together to make one.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

The four of us stood in silence as we watched the surrounding girls play games or gossip. It was almost as if I did not belong here anymore. It was like I was peering in through a window from a completely different world.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

We laughed as we ducked behind a pile of snow. Then our brothers came charging through the barrier, sending the four of us sliding down a white slope full of cherished memories.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

She was not in the body of a young woman but just as I remembered her: a little toddler with a beautiful smile. She reached out with her small hand, and I gripped her tiny fingers as I let go of the pain and sank deeper into the lake.

~ Erica Sehyun Song