The House of Lincoln Quotes

“She [Ana Ferreira Evans] remembered a remark [Mrs.] Alsop had once made. Some people are willfully ignorant. They aren't stupid--they simply choose to be oblivious. That way they aren't responsible for anything that goes wrong.”
― Nancy Horan, The House of Lincoln

“Some day she [Ana Ferreira Evans] would write what she had learned about love in her widowhood. Love needs a place to go. Your heart doesn't stop making it when you lose the single adored person of your life.”
― Nancy Horan, The House of Lincoln

“Ana understood something about him in that moment. Mr. Lincoln believed that slavery was a hideous evil, as she heard so many times in her church and in her own home. But he was trying to build a fort of truth apart from religious belief, a fort built of logic. He was looking at the subject from various angles, apparently trying to find a winning argument against defenders of slavery. She thought of a conversation she’d had with Mrs. Alsop. They try to trick you into thinking slavery is an old inherited custom that will die on its own. Like some old farm equipment that will be replaced by a better system one day. That was how the founding fathers rationalized it. They knew it was wrong. Did they also know it would never die on its own? “Thirty-five years ago, we had”
― Nancy Horan, The House of Lincoln

“Mr. Lincoln himself, who lays down his main proposition in these words: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Union cannot endure permanently half free and half slave. I do not expect the Union will be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
― Nancy Horan, The House of Lincoln