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

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“Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on the cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the coral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.”
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― Louise Murphy, quote from The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

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