I think that everything you do helps you to write if you’re a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don’t experience either one of those, you’re being deprived of something.

Aboard a Chesapeake Bay steamer, not long after his surrender, the general heard a fellow passenger insisting that the South had been “conquered but not subdued.” Asked in what command he had served, the bellicose young man – one of those stalwarts later classified as “invisible in war and invincible in peace” – replied that, unfortunately, circumstances had made it impossible for him to be in the army. “Well, sir, I was,” Johnston told him. “You may not be subdued, but I am.

I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men – they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before – out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.

If I tap that little bell,” he told a visitor, obviously relishing the notion, “I can send you to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark.

It wasn’t a question of luck, the way some folks will tell you; they will tell you it’s back luck to be near the wounded. It was just that we didn’t want to be close to them any longer than it took to run past, the way you wouldn’t want to be near someone who had something catching, like smallpox.

Misfortune often develops secret foes,” Davis had said in a letter written earlier that week to Lee, “and oftener still makes men complain. It is comfortable to hold someone responsible for one’s discomfort.

Grant was as usual a good deal more intent on what he had in mind to do to the enemy than he was on what the enemy might or might not do to him.

That was what bothered him most: the fact that she seemed to encourage his advances, and even granted him certain liberties, up to the point at which she turned on him with violence or laughter. He did not know which was worse, the chuckling or the blows; there was something terribly unmanly about being on the receiving end of either. But he looked forward to a time when he could repay her, could laugh at her or strike her as he saw fit. Thus marriage was already in his mind. Next.

Then too, and this was as romantic as the others, Briartree was the only thing she had ever really owned. Everything else had more or less been lent her; so it seemed. But this was hers, earned by blood, the only good she ever got from being kin to her mother.

When protests reached Lincoln he turned them aside with a medical analogy, pointing out that a limb must sometimes he amputated to save a life but that a life must never be given to save a limb; he felt, he said, “that measures, however unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.