Robert Alexander · 229 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“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
“All I can look after is my own farm, serve those who seek when they are sick. I have children to look after so that they will not know what hunger is."
-Istak”
― F. Sionil José, quote from Dusk
“with their mouth open they’ll eat an average of five spiders a night, which is kind of believable if you think about it. Another time Rodrick told me that it’s dangerous to wake someone up when they’re sleepwalking. I thought there could be a chance he was actually telling the truth, because I’m pretty sure I heard that one somewhere else. ZZZZZ”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from Double Down
“God, Ryder. Why do you have to be so perfect?”
“Perfect? I’ve been in love with you for so long now, and I’ve never managed to get it right, not once.”
I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning. “News flash--I think you’ve finally got it this time.”
His smile makes my heart leap.”
― Kristi Cook, quote from Magnolia
“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
“A city holds all that we want and a million times what we don't want.”
― David Vann, quote from Aquarium
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