“…historians will say 'We have a few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men.”

“The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

“A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”

“We never destroyed anything major, but there were a few small casualties. A couple of lamps were sacrificed.”

“Oh yes, We've all danced to this particular tune at one time in our lives. In my experience, the majority of women are hopeless romantics, believing that, in time, he'll realise how wonderful we are, and fall in love with us....”

“I realized then how much alike we were. Both of us looked backwards to a beloved time that was lost to us, a time where everything had been beautiful. Both of us looked forward to some time and place that would be better. And both of us were here, now, in a grim, unhappy time where little was as we wanted it to be. We lived in our memories and in our hopes, enduring the present because we had no other choice, and because we loved the people who lived here with us.”