Colleen Atwood Quotes

I want to know what people thought and what they wore and what they ate for breakfast.

The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Having 'best friends' is - at least for me - as outdated and small-minded a concept as the idea of 'Sunday best clothes.'

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

I've done a lot of costume dramas and things that are set in the past, and it's great to be able to have things that you can research and material that you can look at.

When you're writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?

When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.

Pride seems tew be quite equally distributed; the man who owns the carriage and the man who drives it seem tew have it just alike.

Thomas Jefferson—another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

In ancient times, bodily strength and dexterity, being of greater use and importance in war, was also much more esteemed and valued, than at present. ... In short, the different ranks of men are, in a great measure, regulated by riches.

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.