Melanie Benjamin quotes:

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

Wonderland was all we had in common, after all; Wonderland was what was denied the two of us. I had denied him his; he had denied me mine.

Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.

Dana taught me that the ability to grieve deeply also meant that a person had the capacity to love deeply, laugh deeply, live deeply -- and that this was a capacity to be cherished.

Why, then, did I always feel as if his happiness was my responsibility? It wasn't fair for him to burden me with that. It had never been fair.

I like to imagine the "what ifs" of history.

I suppose at some point, we all have to decide which memories - real or otherwise - to hold on to, and which ones to let go.

Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead I would define it.

Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.

What very mysterious things days were. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours. There's quite a lot we don't know about them.

Why were there so many barriers between us, always? Barriers of clothing, of etiquette, of time and age and reason.

To live for oneself is a terrifying prospect; there is comfort in martyrdomp 364

I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.

Were we women always destined to appear as we were not, as long as we were standing next to our husbands?

...'it's not that you are too small, my little chick,but rather that the world is too big.

I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.

I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren't explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.

My head grew muddled with it all; the silly ways adults acted with one another, never saying what they meant, trusting in sighs and glances and distance to speak for them instead. How dangerous that was! How easy it must be to misinterpret a sigh or a look.

There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.