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

“With this ring, I promise you a strong shoulder to cry on. I promise to hold and care for you whenever you need me. I promise to bring you comfort when you’re sad and to defend you to the last. I give you faith, trust and commitment unfailing. I promise to love you with every breath in my lungs and beat of my heart until the end of time. I promise that the only heart I own will always belong to you and it will never beat for another as long I live. I promise picnics in the summer and cozy nights by the fire in winter. I promise to always cherish and appreciate you and everything you do and to show you every day just how much you mean to me. I will always be yours and you will always be mine. This I promise you”
― Marie Coulson, quote from Bound Together

“The same is within you: things change around you and clouds, thoughts change within you—but the sky of the self, the witnessing self, remains the same.”
― Osho, quote from The Mustard Seed: The Gnostic Teachings of Jesus The Mystic

“the men placed willow wands every 50 feet or so to mark their route—as I did in 1992, but as no one bothered to in 1986 or 2008, an oversight that contributed to both tragedies.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain

“Only two bags, huh?" Helga was eighty, feisty, and the fastest knitter Elsie had ever seen. “We’ll have to work on that. It’s not a respectable stash until it has its own room.”
― Debora Geary, quote from Witches on Parole

“He can trade me to a team below five hundred if he wants to, or worse, I could find myself wearing a duck on my sweater.”
― Rachel Gibson, quote from Simply Irresistible

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.