Quotes from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“You see, my love. As you've always said, after the rain-"
Sun."
After the darkness-"
Light."
And after the illness-"
Health."
Exactly," said the Tsar. "We mustn't give up faith.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“Oh, as the tragedies of Shakespeare have revealed, the fall of kings is but fodder for the riches entertainments.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“Forgive me. It's true. I wander. I wander in my heart and my thoughts. Such is the curse of any emigrant, to abandon one's home and never find another, to always flounder in a sea of remorse.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day
the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the
next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and
walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty
evaporated — poof, gone! — with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic
that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better,
that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now,
I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all,
it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after
their revolution.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“Nikolai did not want to be rescued from that special house and restored to
the brilliancy of the Romanov throne, of this I am absolutely certain. If so
many of his people felt locked in the chains of poverty, then he felt
entrapped by the riches of the dynasty, which is to say that peasant and Tsar alike were liberated by the revolution.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“For very long periods I am really patient, and then out breaks my bad temper. It is not so difficult to bear great trials, but these little buzzing mosquitos are so trying.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“while our Empress was cold on the outside, she was at the same time wildly passionate on the inside, and in this way very, very Russian.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

About the author

Popular quotes

“After a few mouthfuls of moon-flavored air, even the stubbornly drowsy can find themselves wide-eyed.. All the normal noises of life were gone, leaving behind the secretive sounds, the shy sounds, the whispers and conversations of moss disputing with grass over some soft piece of earth, or the hummingbird snoring.”
― N.D. Wilson, quote from Leepike Ridge

“They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

“Crois-moi, il n'y a pas de grande douleur, pas de grands repentirs, de grands souvenirs. Tout s'oublie même les grandes amours. C'est ce qu'il y a de triste et d'exaltant à la fois dans la vie. Il y a seulement une certaine façon de voir les choses et elle surgit de temps en temps. C'est pour ça qu'il est bon quand même d'avoir eu un grand amour, une passion malheureuse dans sa vie. Ça fait du moins un alibi pour les désespoirs sans raison dont nous sommes accablés.”
― Albert Camus, quote from A Happy Death

“The years were falling over like ducks in a shooting gallery, and it seemed to Mr. Bridge that he had scarcely taken aim at one when it disappeared.”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge

“And I think that if you are lucky enough to give and receive love, then you can be happy in the face of suffering. I was talking to a friend about this and we decided that maybe heaven is just that...love. And that heaven exists on a day-to-day basis within people. When they give and receive love, that's a little slice of heaven.”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.