Quotes from Michelle Moran

Some people are so impoverished all they have is gold.

After all, that's why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people's lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours.

The Empress Marie-Louise once asked me if I believed in ghosts. 'I find it hard to believe in something I've never seen,' I told her. But perhaps ghosts aren't meant to be seen. Perhaps they are meant to be felt.

After all, memoirs are not open doors into another person's house. They are more like broken windows, with the owner trying to explain away all of the damage.

A country is only as strong as its military, and only as moral as the men who serve in its ranks.

You will never have to marry for money. You will never have to depend on anyne but yourself.

In Egypt, there is a saying: When good fortune looks down upon us, it does so in threes, one for each part of the Eye of Horus. His upper lid, his lower lid and the eye itself.

Let it be a reminder that nothing in this world can last." "Even pain," I reply.

And although I'd always thought I would feel like an animal released from its cage when my student days were finished, I felt more like a bird that had been pushed from its nest and told it must fly.

We've all done things we'd rather keep in the dark. It's only by shedding light on them that our demons can disappear.

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long. —MARIE ANTOINETTE

But there is nothing interesting about being unprepared.

Everything looks new, but then that is the nature of science.

The only thing money is good for, Marie, is buying time. The time to do the things you like.

And once we die, what we leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. [Pericles]

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them. —SUZANNE NECKER, WIFE OF JACQUES NECKER, MINISTER OF FINANCE

Sometimes, Anu, we have to take actions that make us sad because it's the right thing to do for the future.

Grandmother was like an opal. You could never be sure which colors were really there and which were just tricks of the light.

The Americans are right: there should not be taxation unless the people consent to it. And it should be fair, which means the nobility and clergy should be taxed as well.

Weigh each heart on its own," I shouted, "for how many of us would pass into the Afterlife if Osiris weighed our hearts with those of our akhu?

I let myself be led out, but at the doors of the Great Hall, I turned. "I will never forgive this," I swore, and Nefertiti knew it was meant for her. "I will never forgive this so long as the sun sets on Amarna!" I screamed.

Arjun: ...the men are talking because you're beautiful. Sita: ...I would much rather they talk about me because I'm skilled.

If the gods cannot recognize your names," she warned, "they will never hear your prayers.

What does she need with architecture?" "The same thing my mother needed with eight languages," I replied boldly. "She commanded the best diplomats in the world, but she refused to leave anything to someone else that she could do better herself.