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Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest to Gen Braxton Bragg: I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it.

Jefferson Davis to R E Lee: Were you capable of stooping to it, you could easily surround yourself with those who would fill the press with your laudations, and seek to exalt you for what you had not done rather than detract from the achievements which will make you and your army the subject of history....

Erlendur felt no dread at the thought. He had never dreaded the winter as so many did, not like those who counted the hours until the days would start to lengthen again. He had never regarded winter as an enemy. Time seemed to slow down in the cold and darkness, enfolding him in peaceful gloom.

'General, where are your dead men?' a young officer asked Brig. Gen. John R. Gordon. 'I haven't got any, sir!' he shouted as he rode past on his black stallion. 'The almighty has covered my men with his shield and buckler.'

Other travelers I had met told me that hiking is about reconnecting with nature and getting away from modern life with its pollution, machines, and crowds, but to me it's just walking on dirt and looking at trees. Hopefully that will change as I age.

There's just one problem: once you're deep in the game it's hard to quit even if you do meet the right girl. Things become more about conquest instead of finding a happy relationship. Settling down becomes an unnatural concept.

A Union private on Grant at Vicksburg: "He had on his old clothes and was alone. He sat on the ground and talked with the boys with less reserve than many a little puppy of a lieutenant. He told us that he had got as good a thing as he wanted here."

Soldier at Champion Hill: "There they lay, the blue and the grey intermingled; the same rich American blood flowing out in little rivulets of crimson; each thinking he was in the right."

Stonewall Jackson's last words: "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."

Lyrics about Ambrose Burnside's famous "Mud March": Now I lay me down to sleep / In mud that's many fathoms deep \ If I'm not here when you awake / Just hunt me up with an oyster rake

Lee at Fredericksburg: It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

I stood up. For a moment I saw Gloria again, sitting on that bench by the pier. The bullet had just struck her in sie of the head; the blood had not yet started to flow. The flash from the pistol still lighted her face. Everything was plain as day. She was completely relaxed, was completely comfortable.

At some point in early 1930s the [Los Angeles] D.A.'s investigative unit, or a part of it, stopped being a small unit of policing reform and became a part of the disease it had set out to cure, another aspect of the darkness of the time.

Much can be controlled by money, but not everything -- not even by $300 million. E. L. Doheny discovered this on that fateful night in February 1929 -- for his son was killed by a member of his staff, a trusted and put-upon servant.

But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it's a counter-tradition....

Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.

The place was being reorganized, as they called it. Well-educated, gentlemanly young fellows, scions of the best French families, were sitting in quiet offices, studying the whole thing in the interests of efficiency. Their learned cogitations were producing unpractical plans that found expression in a weekly batch of new regulations.

They had a daughter named Gudrun. She was the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was good-looking.

He longed to be at peace. He longed to see the stars that were obscured behind the clouds. He wanted to seek solace in them: the awareness of something greater and more important than his own consciousness, the awareness of vast tracts of time and space where he could lose himself for a while.

Lives don't make sense in reality, they come and go and often, like tsunamis, with the same crash, and they sweep away the dregs stagnating in your head like they were relics, which are treasures to you but don't stand still. What a necropolis of sensations!

It's called Family Cliff because we use it to cut down the size of our family whenever something extraordinary happens. In this way our elders are allowed to die without delay, and suffer no illnesses, and go straight to Odin, while their children are spared all the trouble and expense of having to take care of them.

The difficult thing was to survive without having to go back down [the mountain]. We grew what békés call secondary crops and we call food crops. Near the food crops you have to plant medicine plants, which bring luck and disarm zombies. Growing them all tangled up with each other never tires the soil. That's Creole gardening.

Oh Sophie, darlin', you can say "History" but that means nothing. So many lives, so many destinies, so many tracks go into the making of our unique path. You dare say History, but I say histories, stories. The one you take for the master stem of our manioc is but one stem among many others....

A detail in the present version reflecting Icelandic beliefs is the Ghost's use of 'Garún', a nonexistent name, instead of 'Guðrun', because ghosts are unable to utter the word Guð, 'God.'

It suits Halldor [Laxness] to site Utopia in a place he has never seen. This may be an indication of why he becomes -- at least in his fiction -- doubtful about radical social struggle: he transports the ideal of a better society to the dream world that is inaccessible to human beings.

One starts off a poet and ends up a travelling salesman: that is the tragedy of being a writer.

It is unlucky for a writer to be born in a tiny isolated country, condemned to a language that no one understands. But one day I hope that the stones in Iceland will speak to the whole world through me.

I shall not conceal the fact that next to the plague I consider no sorrow more tragic for the history of the Icelandic nation than the emigration to Canada during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The difference is that those who died from the plague went to heaven, but those that went west disappeared into the British Empire or the humbug culture of the United States.

I am created from the fates of men and women, nations and entire centuries. During the day, I walk up to a hilltop and stretch out my arms and feel like dying from the knowledge that I am composed of so many different fates.