historical-fiction

Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky." Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride

Lady's mouth tasted like blood and iron all the time now. It tasted like defeat.

He speaks in that strange sports talk, telling me about the start of the new season and asks if I follow baseball. No. I really don__. He assures me if I stay in town long enough I will become a baseball fan. It__ a requirement of living in St. Louis. Everyone is a Cardinal__ fan. __oyal,_ he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.

In my end lies my beginning" Who said that? Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542-1587).

Discourses, which are mostly wrapped in spurious religious and patriotic ideologies that ignite the enthusiasm of the ignorant masses

The problem with living so long is that you see too many people pass before you.

If the gods chose Sextus as King of Rome, the worst possible evil will befall it

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

The virtuous are among the the weakest and quickest to sin

He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the wood stove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.

Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?

History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.

when you walk the path of revenge, know that someone will always follow your trail

Their eyes locked.They could see into each other's souls. This was why she had been born.

Even a goat got to be a goat." Esperança's comments about slaves during the triangular slave trade.

Not having any drink about ain__ the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body__ perspective.

Whatever befalls us, we will endure it together. I clutch my longbow and dagger close to my side. My last thoughts linger on my husband and my boy. I will not let harm come to either of them.

I stand now at a crossroads. I see before me the route to virtue, at an intersection with the route to love. Do I step to the left or the right, to the wrong or the right? M foot wavers in the air; where shall I set it down?