They didn’t realize that if you take away the possibility of pain, and suffering, failure…you also take away the possibility of happiness, success, and joy.” -The Old Man: DOMINATUS

Not strictly one of mine, but worth repeating! A very forceful old lady in these parts, when referring to the eight novels of the Angel Mountain Saga,was heard to say: “You know them books by that fellow Brian John? If I was you I wouldn’t believe a single word. Take it from me. It’s lies...

The British could leave and half India wouldn’t notice us leaving just as they didn’t notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..

All malice, real and imagined, Ralegh’s and the KIng’s, will die upon the instant stroke of an axe. Be buried with him. His faith, then? Whatever remains will be parted. Some will go with the head and some with the headless body. Let them look for each other on Judgment Day. Perhaps on that day,...

If anyone or anything tries to curse or kill the Goodness at the Center of all things, it will just keep coming back to life. Forever Easter.

Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and took out his Bible, a gift from his father, Captain Benjamin K. Matthews, on the the day he had ridden off to war. Aaron opened to the Psalms, intending to read, but his eyes were heavy and closed against his will. O death, where is thy sting? Pastor...

I’d rather make a good run than a bad stand.

Mr. Edwards admired the well-built, pleasant house and heartily enjoyed the good dinner. But he said he was going on West with the train when it pulled out. Pa could not persuade him to stay longer.”I’m aiming to go far West in the spring,” he said. “This here, country, it’s too settled up for me....

Mogadishu the beautiful – your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean – you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

He is dressed in a long, white robe and in his hand is a white cap. I draw up as he passes down the hall; he does not see me. Shortly I hear a horse leaving. There is much I do not know about him, but tonight I know one of his secrets. He is...

Life’s temptations have the purpose of putting our spiritual integrity to the test. To yield to them, however, gives one a precarious and tormented satisfaction. But the worst temptations are those we give in to without getting anything in return except for the brutal discovery of our weakness.

Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women’s equality hasn’t always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.

All good things originate with the Creator God, he’d been taught, and the Song of Life was no exception.

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday’s Departure

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

As people’s hopes soared, Jana felt a tinge of fear.

The end is but a new beginning for the eternal “Ba.

Some day…as you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.

He could never be anything more than what he was: the inheritor of weakness and unbridled emotion, a creature possessed by the past, and carrying its curse forever into the future–

Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.

When you live in my house, you learn to be fine with whatever you come across. It’s the only way to stay sane in insanity.

Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU

It wasn’t my choice to write this story…it was my responsibility.

Vera had also hated lipstick, Marzipan and Lutherans – excluding her husband, but not her late mother-in-law. Most of all she hated being governed by anyone or anything.

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.

Tethered to the universe by tendrils of history, with threads of continuity descending to God knows where, I see that I’m more than the dust I’ll become.” This quote is from my novel, “Whispers from St. Mary’s Well.” Many readers have said that, like the fictional narrator of the story, Carrie Rose Stillwell, they felt...

Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.

… every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Megan’s deception is another hook on which I can hang my conscience.

She says it is a school for bluestockings which, according to her, is really only a fashionable way of saying it is a school for ugly girls who cannot find suitable husbands. To tease her, for I believe it is one of his greatest pleasures in this life, my father bought a pair of blue...

Il sorriso di Helen mi tranquillizzò; in fondo era una delle persone che amava leggere per prima i miei lavori. Intinsi la punta nell’inchiostro e scrissi le prime parole: Il cuore rivelatore.

[…] That is why we are here today, because we have had the strength within us to survive, a flame inside of us that have not gone out. We are still human, not dust, like millions of others, and we will continue to be, no matter what adversity we face.

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be…[he kisses her]…MINE…

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to...

You’ll likely always have some reason or other to hang onto that girl. You just want her cause she was married to your son, and I understand that, he was a friend to me like a brother, near the only family I ever knew, and I miss him almost as much as you. But I...

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can’t feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is...

A warrior becomes experienced by being defeated; a scholar by making mistakes. Defeat and mistakes we have left in the past,” he said.

It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.

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

I’m learning not to hope for what I can’t control…

Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering – our civil war, if you will – I have solicited your aid.

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

‎”He smiled at me and I felt the tenderness only a daughter could feel.

Sunset encroached upon daylight like a powder burst from the mouth of a crimson cannon—orange and gold ribbons shot forth to wage a battle against the clouds. The western horizon was obscured by a glow like a living thing.

Good men are often more practical than pretty ” said Mother. “Andrius just happens to be both.

Cowan son of Branieucc, you’re the only one of my people that I know for sure still lives.