Mary was like a caged tiger in the first days of her captivity. Keen, alert, and watchful, she listened tensely each dawn for the key that unlocked her door. After breakfast she watched the road for m...
Mary fell asleep early, but her dreams were most unpleasant. She was a mouse running across the kitchen floor, and Elizabeth was a sharp-clawed cat waiting silently to pounce. Then she was a wild deer...
The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.
It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then w...
In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.
I thought of the Roman way of impaling oneself on a sword. Certainly poison seemed more civilized. And I thought the Romans were a little too eager to commit suicide. It did not take much of a setback...
Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.
When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,' someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.
Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth's cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silver...
In France her tutor had once taught her that to truly fix an image in the mind to fasten it down completely so that it remained forever captive and vivid she should carefully name each aspect of the t...
The soft strings of the lute rippled with memories, and the maid's lilting voice made Mary sigh as she closed her eyes. She fell asleep filled with sadness, but without regret.
It is thus that inanimate objects seem to soak up the essence of living things, and later cause pain or pleasure when we merely look at them.
I was ever the realist, sometimes to my sorrow. But seldom to my regret.
For a man, however, it was the opposite. Alexander’s beauty was not felt to detract from his generalship. Nowhere was it hinted that a handsome man could not be a good ruler, or clever, or strong, or...
What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test.
To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.
Our minds see things that our eyes cannot. I suppose something continues to exist until the mind that sees it no longer exists.
My firm resolve was to escape my wicked cousin and my English captors. But the wind was howling, and rain was coming down in sheets. And even as I relaxed in a hot bath in my snug apartments, the clam...
Kindness is stronger than iron bars.
Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.