Heather Grigsby > Heather's Quotes

“I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“To see the years touch ye gives me joy", he whispered, "for it means that ye live.”
― Diana Gabaldon (Jamie Fraser)

“How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?”
― Gwenn Wright, The BlueStocking Girl

“Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A little truth seasons a lie like salt.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.”
― Laurie R. King

“True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“My love for you won't stop with my leaving. Come an evening over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that'll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you.”
― Penelope Williamson

“His eyes swelling with tears, the alien salt stinging. Not tears of sadness, this he decides. He won't let them be anything more than a body's way of letting go.”
― Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Ancestor

“Roger speaking to Brianna:
It's too important. You don't forget having a dad."
You do remember your father?"
No. I remember yours.”
― Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone

“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

“I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“It is easier to start a war than to end it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“Sonetimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.”
― Sarah Sundin

“A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.”
― Jane Yolen, Girl in a Cage

“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.--Ray Bradbury”
― T.K. Thorne

“I thought the force of my wanting must wake ye, surely. And then ye did come. . ." He stopped, looking at me with eyes gone soft and dark. "Christ, Claire, ye were so beautiful, there on the stair, wi' your hair down and the shadow of your body with the light behind ye…." He shook his head slowly. "I did think I should die, if I didna have ye," he said softly. "Just then.”
― Diana Gabaldon

“You can only chase a butterfly for so long.”
― Jane Yolen, Prince Across the Water

“Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.
Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I
certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain
down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,
it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh
the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have
you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against
your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree
and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You
kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for
me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow
word, you can’t rush it...”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“They rode for a while in silence, a tiny island in the smoky stream of marching men. Then Lee said slowly, in a strange, soft, slow tone of voice, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice. "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men."
Lee rarely lectured. Longstreet sensed a message beyond it. He waited. Lee said, "We don't fear our own deaths, you and I." He smiled slightly, then glanced away. "We protect ourselves out of military necessity, not do not protect yourself enough and must give thought to it. I need you. But the point is, we are afraid to die. We are prepared for our own deaths, and for the deaths of comrades. We learn that at the Point. But I have seen this happen: we are not prepared for as many deaths as we have to face, inevitably as the war goes on. There comes a time..."
He paused. He had been gazing straight ahead, away from Longstreet. Now, black-eyed, he turned back, glanced once quickly into Longstreet's eyes, then looked away.
"We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few. But the war goes on. And the men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers...can pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us." He paused again. "But never ALL of us. Surely not all of us. But...that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally. And yet ,if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

“I have never learned to hate. Don't let my first lesson come from you.”
― Susan Carroll

“Every great day has a story and a song!”
― Faith Reese Martin, White Doe in the Mist: The Mystery of the Lost Colony

“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“There are some things you never say good-bye to”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“One night when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.”
― Sarah Bower, Sins of the House of Borgia

“happy is the nation without a history”
― Cesare Beccaria, Dos Delitos e das Penas

“Never bet your money on another man's game.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy