Historical Fiction Quotes

Dead man shouldn’t have no fears. Makes his passing easier.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

What one of us wants we all want. You a man of the earth as you are, you ought to have known we hunt in packs. And now I come to finish you.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

She ran the harder and zagged more erratically, and in the wreckage left from the hurricane the girl misjudged her path and ran straight into the old well. She didn’t even scream.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

You want a sermon? Jesus died and resurrected and then run off to Heaven to leave us sinners here. Amen.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

The oaks along the ridge were writhing like tortured epileptics in the winds, and she could make out through the thick rain a cascade of water like a cataract come roiling down the inside slope toward her; a vast arching spray exploded bright against the dark sky as the Gulf slammed over the chenier.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

So you do enjoy my lovemaking?She lifted an eyebrow. If you can't tell that, sir, you are blind and deaf and probably stupid.If he'd been a peacock, he would have been strutting about, displaying his feathers.

~ Sabrina Jeffries

You are a woman born of secrets and sadness. It will either destroy your future or lead you to greatness. A handsome gentleman with eyes like the sky and hair like a raven's wing will come into your life. If you let him, he will become the hand of your vengeance. If you let him,he will shatter your heart.

~ Sabrina Jeffries

About Anna Faktorovich's Romances of George Sand: “What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.

~ Belinda Jack

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.She tried to smile once more and expired.

~ Victor Hugo

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

~ Lee Strauss

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

~ Nadifa Mohamed

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism

~ Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths, they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

~ Nadifa Mohamed

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”Patricia Briggs.

~ Demetra Angelis Foustanellas

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

~ Laura Morelli

It's history as it should have happened. It's history made better.

~ R.a. Mccandless

'Are our gods better than Olaf's god?' Alfdis laughed. 'That's a silly question. Gods are gods. Our gods have been with us since the beginning of the world. We sacrifice to them, and they aid us when they see fit. Other people have their own gods and their own ways of dealing with them. That's their concern.'

~ James Erich

Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.

~ Elizabeth Graver

Even still, it wasn't over. For if a battle could be won so easily, men would soon forget its horrors and clamor for it all the more. War would come more than once or twice a generation. Easy victories would produce men who were struck dumb with their own unbelievably improbable successes. Such men wold begin to think they had devised not the superior tactic, but rather the supreme tactic at winning

~ Jason Born

Septimus grinned. It's not coins I seek. I seek the power of Hercules.

~ Jason Born

The great Sugambrian shrugged. I did. I supposed you've proven your worth. But no man should have to kill his own father. I should know.

~ Jason Born

Her entire life, she’d been told sin was wrong, a black and white interpretation of what is evil and what is holy in the world—colored like a priest’s robe and collar—but she never believed it to be true. Sin was colorful: scarlet like rose blood, azure like skin deprived oxygen, violet as bruises, jade as rot; a colorful contradiction to the darkness and blinding light all are taught sin and holiness to be.

~ Madi Merek

...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...

~ Robert Harris

I'd rather make a good run than a bad stand.

~ Margaret Walker

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

~ G. M. Trevelyan

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

~ Philippa Gregory

Isabel Valverde was coming home. The brief, terrible letter from her brother had brought her across five thousand miles of ocean, from the New World to the Old, and during the long voyage she thought she had prepared herself for the worst. But now that London lay just beyond the next bend of the River Thames, she dreaded what awaited her. The not knowing – that was the hardest. Would she find her mother still a prisoner awaiting execution? Horrifying though that was, Isabel could at least hope to see her one last time. Or had her mother already been hanged?

~ Barbara Kyle

Snow crunched under the feet of three cloaked figures – a queen, her lady, and a gravedigger – as they hurried along a moonlit path in Windsor Castle's lower ward. The gravedigger pushed a cart that held a slab of marble, his pick and shovel, and some straw. When the trio reached the steps of St. George's Chapel, Queen Mary stopped. She turned her head, pushing aside the fur of her hood, and a gust of wind needled her with crystallized snow. She looked back at her attendants. Was she wrong to trust them with this night's work?

~ Barbara Kyle

When giving up is not an option, you survive at any cost.

~ Liliana Shelbrook

Fenella Doorn watched the unfamiliar wreck of a ship ghosting into her bay. Crippled by cannon fire, she thought. What else could do such damage? The foremast was blown away, as well as half the mainmast where a jury rig clung to the jagged stump, and shot holes tattered the sails on the mizzen. And yet, to Fenella’s experienced eye the vessel had an air of defiance. Demi-cannons hulked in the shadowed gun ports. This ship was a fighter, battered but not beaten. With fight still in her, was she friend or foe?

~ Barbara Kyle

The night of the fireworks changed the course of many lives in England, though no one suspected the dark future as hundreds of courtiers stared, faces upturned in delight, at the starbursts of crimson, green, and gold that lit up the terraces, gardens, and pleasure grounds of Rosethorn House, the country home of Richard, Baron Thornleigh. That night, no one was more proud to belong to the baron’s family than his eighteen-year-old ward, Justine Thornleigh; she had no idea that she would soon cause a deadly division in the family and ignite a struggle between two queens. Yet she was already, innocently, on a divergent path, for as Lord and Lady Thornleigh and their multitude of guests watched the dazzle of fireworks honoring the spring visit of Queen Elizabeth, Justine was hurrying away from the public gaiety. Someone had asked to meet her in private.

~ Barbara Kyle

Please do not mistake me for a twopenny villain. I do nothing without a purpose.

~ Donna Thorland

He could inspire ballads. He could inspire wars.

~ Eli Easton

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven’s gate.

~ Ned Hayes

So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?

~ Dominique Wilson

He didn't know what he was anymore – not truly Chinese, for he had spent too long in the West, adopted too many Western ideas, but neither did he feel truly Westernised. There had been times when he had thought himself so, but a glimpse at his reflection quickly showed him the impossibility of such thoughts. No, rather, he felt suspended between two worlds, never to truly belong to either. The Yellow Papers

~ Dominique Wilson

America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Jeffries and Quaker wife Amy, is also haunted by betrayal and a relentless, deadly enemy seeking to destroy him. Facing his own worst fears, Nathan is hunter and hunted in a violent world at war.

~ Bert J. Hubinger

They didn’t realize that if you take away the possibility of pain, and suffering, failure…you also take away the possibility of happiness, success, and joy. -The Old Man: DOMINATUS

~ D.w. Ulsterman

Positive thoughts (expectations) can change perspective, transform behaviors, and attract good fortune.

~ Donna M. Mcdine

Great job, you just executed Ben Franklin! - Otto Ray

~ Monet Polny