285 quotes
Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
Southern Victory (1997)
“And if you don’t bet, how do you expect to win?”
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t look at things that way. To him, not betting meant you couldn’t lose. He hadn’t even thought of winning.
Opening of the World (2007)
Blaine hated the Confederate States because they were a rival, not because they were tyrants. Had they been exemplars of purest democracy, rivals they would have remained, and he would have hated them no less.
Southern Victory (1997)
Of course, the Confederacy was also a Christian country…and what did that say about Christianity? Nothing good, she was sure.
Southern Victory (1997)
He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.
Southern Victory (1997)
He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.
Southern Victory (1997)
He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.
Southern Victory (1997)
Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.
Southern Victory (1997)
No, he hadn’t a clue. She studied him—perfect coif, perfect clothes, perfect confidence. Inside, where it didn’t show, she smiled a hunter’s smile. Perfect target.
Southern Victory (1997)
Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.
Southern Victory (1997)
Like South Carolina, Utah is too large to be an insane asylum and too small to make a nation, and, unlike South Carolina, lacks other nearby states full of zanies to join her in her madness.
Southern Victory (1997)
The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t—their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies.
Southern Victory (1997)
“Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”
“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy.
Southern Victory (1997)
The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.
Southern Victory (1997)
“I don’t hide anything I aim to do; I just come right out and say it.” An alarm whistle went off in Anne’s head; any man who said something like that was almost bound to be lying.
Southern Victory (1997)
“Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?”
“I hope there’s gray, Menefee said. “Black and white make things easier, but only if you don’t want to think.”
Southern Victory (1997)
And Ulric was a man of parts, no doubt about it. Just what the parts added up to…Yes, that was a different question.
Opening of the World (2007)
“We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”
Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying.
Southern Victory (1997)
He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.
Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?
Southern Victory (1997)
But when he ached, when he panted, when the world was too much with him, Marx and revolution held a wild temptation. Like cheap booze for a drunk, he thought wearily, except revolutions make people do even stupider things.
Southern Victory (1997)