Cassi Clerget

“Why did she want to stay in England? Because the history she was interested in had happened here, and buried deep beneath her analytical mind was a tumbled heap of Englishness in all its glory, or kings and queens, of Runnymede and Shakespeare's London, of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes and Watson rattling off into the fog with cries of 'The game's afoot,' of civil wars bestrewing the green land with blood, of spinning jennies and spotted pigs and Churchill and his country standing small and alone against the might of Nazi Germany. It was a mystery to her how this benighted land had produced so many great men and women, and ruled a quarter of the world and spread its language and law and democracy across the planet.”
― Elizabeth Aston, Writing Jane Austen

“I'm going to be fit and slim and beautiful. I'm going on a diet as of today."
"Why? You've always said that looks don't matter and women only diet for men and life is obsessed with the superificial."
"Yes, I know, but then I thought, hey wouldn't it be fun to be sexy?”
― Melissa Nathan, Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction.”
― Lauren Willig