Quotes from Edward Whittemore

Yes. Despite the ultimate mystery of the universe there's still one small truth we can live by. Choice. Never merely to take what we are given or inherit, but to choose. It may not seem like much but it's the difference between meanings and memories that disappear in the sand, and something that doesn't. Choice is the arrow. For then, at least, we play a part in making ourselves.

Something else apart from this heady fusion draws us in to Nile Shadows, though, and that's a certain compulsive quality that, as in all great novels, appears to be beyond the author's control. On the one hand Whittemore is the master story teller, weaving his tale of good and evil with its great cast of characters over its great span of time, while on the other he is also telling a much simpler story, a story about himself, one feels, and telling it again and again.

People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else.

No, no guns, they won't get us anywhere. I tried that when I was young and it's a useless interim game. Use guns and you're no better than the Black and Tans and that's not good enough.

It seems that's it for me and what's a soul to do then? What's a soul to do?" "Simply go on loving her." "So I seem to be doing but what's the sense of it? Where does it lead?" The frail hand tightened on his and then was gone. Haj Harun knelt in front of him and held him by the shoulders, his face serious. "You're still young, Prester John. Don't you see it leads nowhere? It's an end in itself.

The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can't assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he's strong inside, so we'll wait and watch and listen, and we'll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.

From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs were set up on the ships and aimed at the quay. Caruso sang from Pagliacci all night across a harbor filled with bloated corpses. An admiral going to dine on another ship was late because a woman's body fouled his propeller.

And you'll like him, the cobbler, you'll all like him. He has amusing stories to tell and he's much better on dates than I am, and also he goes back much further, having already been a man when I was still a boy. I know we will. Certainly we will. Haj Harun smiled distantly. Well I think I'll come down now. I think it's time we began our rounds. Truly, yes do that. According to the once portable sundial in the front room, it's almost o'clock.

most general officers never had a headache but they did invariably suffer from constant indigestion, a result of their inability to expel the gases that accumulated in them in the course of a day spent agreeing with everything their superiors said.

I ask you, what do I have to hide? The fact that I'm not half the man I wanted to be? The fact that these little pieces of wisdom I string together add up to not much at all?

Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway. Stern's words, he suddenly realized. Stern's very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether. Strange, he thought. Time is.

In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come….