Quotes from James Alexander Thom

Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.

We pick bygone time up by the handfuls and, like clay, see if it feels right and then form it into stories about the past.

For every time we regret keeping still, there are about ten times we regret speaking up.

Aphorism: a concise, clever statement. Afterism: a concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.

Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.

Once upon a time it was now.

But then he remembered what George had told him about pain. You know what you can do, even if your body says quit. It's only pain. "It's only pain, he thought, hearing George's voice and seeing his eagle-face. If anyone would know, George would, he thought. And truly, he thought, it's the most useful one thing a body can know.

He remembered another one of his mother's saying. It was back when she'd birthed Fanny, her tenth. Someone had siad it was about time she gave up mothering and rested. "Nay," she had said. "I've started something, and now I wouldn't stop if I could, and I couldn't stop if I would.

Any marnin' th' good Lord lets'ee open your eyes, that's a day he's got somethin' f'r ye t' do.

Womenfolk just tend to get lost, he'd always say; it's just a weakness they've got.

May we be strong by doing what is right

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means "dead hand." Its definition is: "The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present." (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

Weshecat-welo k'weshe-laweh-pah, let us be strong by doing right.

And if you think far enough about it you know that a molecule of water that once fell from you in a tear or a drop of sweat or a drop of blood forty years ago might be back in your veins or in your bladder after having gone through the ground and down streams into the sea and around the world as vapor and clouds and back to where you are as rain or snow, and into you via your morning coffee, maybe even having passed through an Eskimo and a fox and an oak tree in the meantime.

Ghetel was clawing at the rotten bark on the underside of the big fallen tree that sheltered them. Bark debris and wood-punk kept falling on the blanket. Ghetel, a silhouette against the half-light, would scrabble in the decaying wood for a moment, then pause and put something to her mouth