Quotes from Stephen O'Connor

People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby's laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

We are judged... not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.

But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn't listen, and now I am damned. . .

He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. "Everything's ready, Your Excellency.

He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia.

Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child's desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. "We are judged," he says as he moves toward the door, "not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others." He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.