J. May

“I’m sure it wasn’t easy being in your big sister’s shadow for 104 years. You complained about it a lot but I know you’d have been miserable without me.
Well, I’m glad things have worked out the way they have, because you never had to be alone, Bessie
Funny thing is, though, by leaving me here by myself, you're letting me get the last word. Ooooooh, I'm not sure you would have liked that!

- Sarah L. Delany”
― Sarah L. Delany, On My Own at 107: Reflections on Life Without Bessie

“As Therese Asche used to say “A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelations. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.”
― Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War

“So Anna did not blame the women of her time for what they had created; it was different only in kind from what she had made herself. And if the old soldiers wanted only to forgive, Anna understood that, too, though in her own memory she could no longer find anything that needed forgiving. In the sunlight by her cousin’s grave, she would touch the black ostrich plume in her hat—the plume that, like herself, grew a little older and little more frayed every year—and think about what all of it meant to her. Down the hill slept the soldiers, and she would visit certain of them in a little while, and the thought of them—their faces, their voices, their particular ways—always made her smile. General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself told her once that she had seen the last of a great army, but he was wrong in that, for they still moved out there in the sunlight, all of them. He was right about one thing though: there was no shame in it, not ever.”
― Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War