“[He] had insisted that inanimate objects couldn't have malignant motivations, but Emma had extensive proof to the contrary.”

“Right now, I couldn't have cared less if someone had waltzed across the room in a large flower costume with a sign saying GET YOUR BLACK TULIPS HERE. Every nerve in my body was on man-alert, screaming, "incoming!”

“The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.”

“About, not to. Prepositions had been invented for a reason.”

“When they arrived at Parva Magna, everyone agreed that it was quite a good thing thatthe newly married couple had managed to find shelter in the storm, although there was someconfusion as to why it had taken them a full three days to make their way fifteen miles.”

“As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction.”

“He admired her for throwing off her aristocratic shackles -- his terms, that -- and making her own way in the world.He didn't realize that the truth was so much more complex, so much less impressive. She had less thrown than been thrown.”