I’m not studying the heroes who lead navies—and armies—and win wars. I’m studying ordinary people who you wouldn’t expect to be heroic, but who, when there’s a crisis, show extraordinary bravery and s...
If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.
I don't know who started the myth that sheep are fluffy and white. They were more the color of an old mop and just as matted with dirt.
How much of an effect on history can an animal have? A big one. Look at Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, and the little gentleman in the black fur coat who’d killed King William the Third when...
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
Her. I never felt properly sorry for schizophrenics, she thought, unable to escape the voices in their heads and fighting for their sanity with a maelstrom of noise all around them, making it impossib...
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’?
Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche,...
Cyril had staked out his claim and refused to move. Move over! I said, freeing one hand from holding the cat to push. Dogs are supposed to sleep at the foot of the bed. Cyril had never heard of this r...
And I found myself in a corner of Blackwell’s Book Store. Its dark woods and book-lined walls are not only instantly recognizable but timeless, and for a moment I thought I’d made it back to 2057, and...
Will I ever see you again? No. Do I love you? Yes, for all time.
She reached the group. Eileen had been crying. She wiped clumsily at her cheeks as Polly joined them, and then smiled at her. Are you ready? Eileen asked., Polly thought. Yes.Are you certain? Colin sa...
None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.
It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not t...
And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.
Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spi...
The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic, Ben said, leaning on the gate. Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure.They suddenly become le...
It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a do...
Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—