Historical Fiction Novel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Ayn Rand

Love is an elusive fantasy that torments maidens and confounds young men. ~ Padraic Connelly

The virtuous are among the the weakest and quickest to sin ~ Aziz Hamza

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

Please look for a new work of historical fiction, The Black Spaniard by L.L.Holt, to be published by Unsolicited Press during the 2016-2017 season. Set roughly between 1792 and 1804 in Vienna, Austria, the novel explores a creative genius's encounters with cultural diversity, transformation, and the love of a good friend. ~ L.L.Holt

I bear the Russian man no ill. A Stanislav has as much right to walk God's earth as does a Stanley. ~ Kevin Ansbro

You must remember also that He would never make any mistake in creating you. No matter what harsh and hateful words have been said to you, no matter the wrong actions against you, those opinions are not valid. The only valid opinion in which we can place true merit is that of God, and ultimately, your own.--Olivia Worthington of River Oaks Plantation ~ Lisa M. Prysock

When I write I feel like I can breathe. It's like yoga for the brain. ~ Elise Stokes

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised. ~ Lani Guinier

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

God always provides other options for His people when they are tempted to take an unrighteous path. But if we depend only on ourselves to solve our problems, we narrow our vision and see none of those options. ~ Karen Witemeyer

Don't shove away a lifetime of blessing because you fear trials. You'll have them no matter what you do.~ Marianne Lister ~ Melissa Jagears

All our lives, we long, we long, thinking it is the moon we long for. So how, when we meet it in the shape of a most fair woman, can we do less than leave all others for her? WB Yeats ~ Orna Ross

It's not just what Christian fiction lacks I appreciate - it's what it offers. The variety is vast: contemporary, historical, suspense, mysteries, adventure, young adult, romance, fantasy, science fiction. ~ Randy Alcorn

Below the waterbag were his guns,finely weighted to his hand. The two belts crisscrossed above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained. The holsters were tied down with
raw hide cord, and they swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gun belts twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle
creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. ~ Stephen King

I don't want to look. I've got to look." Vance ... "Vital Perception ~ D.L. Given

Benedick Scott was on his way to freedom or profound failure or, if the usual order of things held up, both. Two chests, strapped closed and marked for delivery to an apartment in Manhattan, sat at the end of his bed. On his person he needed only his typewriter, slung over his shoulder in a battered case. He'd stuffed the case with socks to cushion any dinging, along with his shaving kit, a worn copy of Middlemarch, and thirty-four pages of typed future. ~ McKelle George

Our house has its back to the sea,' writes Hester in her journal. 'Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better. ~ Tanya Moir

A novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Am I your weakness?"
"Of course you are. ~ Brian A. McBride

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended. ~ John Green

Private Eye continued to report that the stench in the Houses of Parliament was just as strong as it had been on the day when the birds flew away and the rodents fled. ~ Stephen Vizinczey

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids' story? ~ Julian Barnes

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ~ Julie Checkoway

Have you worked towards your dream today?

Alan Shepherd ~ Pamela Harstad

You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be ... [he kisses her] ... MINE ... ~ Neil Jordan

People who's freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don't want to live like that. ~ Haruki Murakami

People believe in everything except the reality. ~ Min Kim

Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England ~ Lauren Willig

I was a little resentful that when a woman writes, her personal story becomes part of the story, even though the novel is fiction. ~ Roxane Gay

What matters now, is what you choose to do in the next hour, what you choose to do tomorrow. If your past decisions didn't get you where you wanted to be, figure out what decisions will. Beating yourself up over the past won't change a thing. ~Annie ~ Melissa Jagears

Perhaps Zeus was king, but I was Spartan, a princess twice over, and queen of Athens besides. I knew my duty. And I would rule my own fate. ~ Amalia Carosella

When one is busy, as she was in Donegal, life whistles by. One struggles to keep up with oneself. It is vital, when one slows down, to be conscious of small things, small moments. To take pains. ~ Orna Ross

and here instead's another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which sophia is the kind of character she'd choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there's no room for severed heads; a work in which sophia's perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she's in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that's thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank god, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the fut ~ Ali Smith

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Do you prefer him or her? Either one's cool-I'm genderfluid. ~ Mvxx. Amillivn

A sideways rain quickly soaked the pair as
they made their way across the street toward a
small diner. Inside, the smell of coffee permeated
the air and Benny Goodman's band could be
heard from a radio in the corner. ~ Dawn Klinge

Horeb bent over me and ran his hand down my neck, not stopping when his fingers reached my chest.
I jerked backward. "What are you doing?"
His eyes were black and intense. "A little taste before the wedding, Jayden? ~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names. ~ Jess Walter

All cats are gray in the dark. And besides, her actions have less to do with her, and everything to do with you. ~ Jaye Frances

War was hell.
So was Andersonville Prison.
Justice lay curled on her side on the dank, roach-infested floor. She inhaled a short breath, trying to keep from breathing too deeply when waste of all sorts and colours lined every square inch of the place. How had it come to this? ~ Ashley Nikole

Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End ~ Ken Scott

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall. ~ Martin Amis

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction ~ Tash Aw

I believe every story that is made in the mind of an author; has a trace in real world.A historical fiction completely or partly has happened in the past and a fiction will happen in the future. We are seeing many devices which Jules Verne predicted in his novels!One day you will hear about an invisible fellow. This thought causes motivation and gaiety for me when writing a story. ~ Hamid Karima

It was like walking into another world. While the mansion was bright, warm, comfy and filled with sound and color, the outside was dark, cold, colorless and devoid of people.
I found myself standing beside Thomas in the street. The paved road felt so cold it was hurting my feet. I kept moving them up and down, afraid my skin would freeze to the pavement. My heart was racing already and I felt a bit out of breath. If we stood there much longer i was going to hyperventilate. ~ J.C. Joranco

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation. ~ Tana French

An old novel has a history of its own. ~ Alexander Smith

In her previous life, Aliya had read somewhere that technology should never be allowed to outrun morality. Otherwise, the clock will strike Armageddon, and both God and the Devil will turn tail and run. ~ Lina J. Potter

The vampire that I am doesn't stop at my fangs." - Damian Blackwood, Mrs. Blackwood ~ Alexa D. Wayne

I might've found a way to cure them." Crystal said in a jumble of words.
"Cure them? Permanently?"
"Yes sir."
He thought about this a moment before speaking, "You've got two weeks, can you do it by then?"
"That's plenty of time sir, thank you. ~ Julia Barkey

The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves. ~ Sue Monk Kidd