Susanne Alleyn > Quotes

“May we never again read about Dark Ages peasants eating tomatoes; unbelievably plucky/feisty liberated medieval heroines with names like Dominique; 18th-century travelers crossing Europe or the Atlantic in a week; slang that's sixty years ahead of its time and many, many other such common anachronisms of fact and attitude...”
― Susanne Alleyn, Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer's (and Editor's) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths

“or even mid September 1793, when Terror—the policy of intimidation—was officially declared "the order of the day" and the Law of Suspects was passed, which made it far too easy for a citizen to be suspected and imprisoned for counter-revolutionary sympathies or even for apathy, and which greatly expanded the powers of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody's cost, to a view of him—stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time;[89] if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the history of your father would have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais." [89] the privilege of filling up blank forms: Mr. Lorry refers to a lettre de cachet, literally, "letter of the seal," meaning the king of France's personal seal. A lettre de cachet was an order, approved by the king, that could send anyone in France to prison without trial, for any reason, and for any length of time. They had often been abused in the 17th and early 18th centuries by aristocrats taking advantage of the king's favor to do away with an enemy or an inconvenience. Once a notorious symbol of arbitrary and absolute power in France, by Louis XVI's reign in the 1770s and 1780s they became much harder to acquire.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“A likely thing, too!" replied the strong woman. "If it was ever intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence would have cast my lot in an island?”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes—many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph—were punishable by death.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion

“No, I mean love. Jealousy is just a form of selfishness; it’s somebody who can’t bear the knowledge that he’s lost something he thought was his. But murder for love…that’s a person acting completely against his usual nature because he has such an intense love for somebody, or something. If what he loves is an idea, then you call it a murder for principles, but it’s all the same in the end. Gain, jealousy, revenge, self-preservation, love,” he repeated, ticking them off on his fingers. “Remember that.” The”
― Susanne Alleyn, The Cavalier of the Apocalypse

“A dangerous thrift it is to amass Only a treasury of regrets. He who holds them too close to his heart Suffers justly, and nothing forgets.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Treasury of Regrets

“Long considered godless vagabonds, professional performers in France had officially been forbidden the sacraments until 1790. Many, in past centuries, had never bothered to secure the necessary dispensations—obtainable through confession to a sympathetic priest and a few discreet bribes—that would have allowed them to marry with the blessing of the Church, and so the immorality of actors had become notorious.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Treasury of Regrets

“Though religious houses had long had a reputation for being both prisons and hotbeds of vice, they had always served as homes for the many surplus, unmarried, dowerless women who, lacking families to support them, would otherwise have lived out their lives in lonely, hopeless poverty.”
― Susanne Alleyn, A Treasury of Regrets

“Oh, silly people at court care, because they’re the sort of fools who believe that one’s ancestors are much more important than one’s personal merit. Prove you’re the great-great-great granddaughter of some medieval king’s illegitimate whelp, as she did, and they’ll fawn all over you and give you money, entry into the right houses, introductions to the right people…”
― Susanne Alleyn, The Cavalier of the Apocalypse