I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

Lauren Willig

Categorized in : Organization Angel Falling In Love

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

Lauren Willig

smell reading book

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

Lauren Willig

writing morning book

There is, I have heard, a little thing called sunrise, in which the sun reverses the process we all viewed the night before. You might assume such a thing as mythical as those beasts that guard the corners of the earth, but I have it on the finest authority, and have, indeed, from time to time, regarded it with my own eyes.

Lauren Willig

sunrise eye night

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

Lauren Willig

brother morning believe

Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.

Lauren Willig

worth-waiting-for virtue waiting

Why was it that cheering expressions were invariably so infuriating?

Lauren Willig

infuriating cheer expression

They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.

Lauren Willig

next might people

Amazing what the application of a knitting needle could do for one's manners.

Lauren Willig

needles knitting manners

Love doesn't attack; it infiltrates.

Lauren Willig

It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.

Lauren Willig

sniping battle usual

LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

Lauren Willig

idiot lasts disease

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away.

Lauren Willig

cutting party clever

Tell them I have the headache--no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.

Lauren Willig

headache nice needs

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

Lauren Willig

historical-novels cousin reality

Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. 'There was going to be champagne, and oysters, and you' - he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture - 'were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and...and...

Lauren Willig

oysters loss hands

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

Lauren Willig

writing beautiful thinking

Quite definitely a Bingley

Lauren Willig

It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature.

Lauren Willig

lovely human-nature cynicism

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

Lauren Willig

nuisance speak-english language

There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.

Lauren Willig

perfect men reality