The Deserter, and Other Stories: A Book of Two Wars

“I am in love with your sinners,” responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. “I’ve had five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they’ve bored the head off me.””

— Harold Frederic

“Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant antechambers of sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than dreamland itself affords.””

— Harold Frederic

“Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.””

— Harold Frederic

“Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience. I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really were happy; and I”

— Harold Frederic

“What you took to be improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!””

— Harold Frederic

“but it seems logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is they who help the church.””

— Harold Frederic

“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “' The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.””

— Harold Frederic