Quotes from Eleanor Herman

Weakness, he has learned, isn't in the arm or the leg or the back. Weakness is in the mind.

Because sometimes it doesn't help to chase after the thing you want. No. Sometimes you have to wait, however long it takes, until what you want most comes to you.

Kat hates men like that, men who are too attractive for their own good-and know it.

He rubs his forehead, frustrated, then raises his eyes, one dark brown, one gray-blue—the

Yet she (Princess Diana) suffered one ancient lament of many princess brides--- her husband didn't love her, hadn't wanted to marry her, rarely slept with her, and far prefered his mistress.

History offers us not a single recorded cell phone conversation between Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan in which His Most Christian Majesty wishes he were a tampon, or photos of Nell Gwynn sunbathing topless in her walled garden near Whitehall Palace. It is most certainly our loss.

Her legacy is that of a woman who refused to conform to the misogynistic traditions of her time.

Boring, religious, and intellectually limited, Marie Leczinska was called one of the two dullest queens in Europe by her own father, the other dull queen being his wife. Marie

But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.

Divine grace, Caravaggio shows us, is not reserved for the rich and powerful, but falls equally on the poor and humble.

The more I see of men," she grumbled in one, "the more I love dogs."50

Alex looks around at Heph, at Diodotus, at handsome Telekles and round-faced Phrixos

When she got pregnant—he refused to wear a condom, perhaps for religious reasons—he sent her money for an abortion

To cure epilepsy, doctors concocted recipes of dried human heart or made a potion of wine, lily, lavender, and an entire adult brain, which weighed about three pounds. Human fat was used to treat consumption, rheumatism, and gout. Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.

The unattainable was most desireable. The already attained was dull.

Maimonides likewise recommended immediate vomiting after consuming suspect food and praised rooster dung as one of the most effective means to bring this about. "It is said that excrements of roosters have a specific property to eliminate every poison by vomiting," he proclaimed.

Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

In 1891, Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Fredrick Augustus, the heir to to the Saxon throne. The Prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, 'Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams an Ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood's dreams.

Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.

Hagnon fixes a value to everything. It occurs to Alexander that the man would probably sell his mother for an obol and consider it a deal.

Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass. —Michel de Montaigne O

O do not be born a woman, if you want your own way. —Lucrezia de' Medici O

From the earliest times, many converts had their own ideas about who Jesus was and what he meant. Those ideas that were not accepted by the mainstream bishops were labeled "heresy," which comes from the Greek heresias, "choice.

Over time, these writings of the early church fathers and the decrees of popes and church councils became accepted truth in the same way the Bible was.