Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.
In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in thos...
His spirit is like a guttering candle
The truth from his ears, waxed strong.
The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.
The priest Zadok looked stricken. He had hoped to bargain information for a higher price. Now I, as a prophet, had given it to David for free.
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
The heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow.
From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.
Matter.
I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enou...
At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, whe...
You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to c...
It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of...
Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard.