A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
Who is the brave man–he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.
I have lived most of my life in soldiers’ camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.
I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.
Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.
When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.
No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.
This night he was a king before he was a man. At this time, this troubled me. Later, I would have cause to wish it were always so.
David was at his best in group settings, soldier enough to join in the raucous jests, king enough to make it matter that he remembered some moments of bravery or sacrifice, and praised each man accordingly.
He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.
David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.
If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.
The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.
To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.
Curiosity – if not desire, if not plain kindness – might have led him to greater zeal.
Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
the greatest cruelty of madness is the power it has to blot out a person.
I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.
Where was his empathy? Buried, I supposed, beneath his self-regard.
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man’s own gift of speed against him.
We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are.
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
David would wear no purple cloth, no symbols of his kingship, when he went to greet the ark. In its presence, we were all of us servants.
It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.
I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.
Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.
It is one thing to know what is to come. It is another thing to confront it.
He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.
He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?
It’s remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.
I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.
David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting.
He said that the music—its order and precision—helped him find the patterns in things—the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.
Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.
I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.
In the heir’s world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.
Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.
I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.
I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.
September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
There’s just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can’t know it all, and that’s where imagination can work.