A Literary Quote for the Day

Book cover. Autograph of the author, in gold, on dignified blue cloth cover.

--Bernard Law, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, K.G. (1958)

of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-without which great actions are seldom accomplished.”
Certainly I can say that my own childhood was unhappy.

I was born in London, in St. Mark’s Vicarage, Kennington Oval, on 17th November 1887.
Sir Winston Churchill in the first volume of Marlborough, His Life and Times wrote thus about the unhappy childhood of some men: “The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur

Book cover. Brown cloth hardcover with gold lettering.

--General Jonathan M. Wainwright, General Wainwright’s Story; The Account of Four Years of Humiliating Defeat, Surrender, and Captivity. (1946)

I scraped the last of the rice from my mess kit and looked out across the little clearing. My aides, Major Johnny Pugh and Captain Tom Dooley, were walking up to the battered trailer that served as my headquarters on Bataan.

Book over. General MacArthur saluting, with a resolute look on his face.

“So help us, God--there goes a soldier!” It was a hard-boiled top sergeant who muttered this truism as General Douglas MacArthur issued orders to his troops going to the battlefront in World War II.

--Francis Trevelyan Miller, General Douglas MacArthur Fighter for Freedom (1942)

Book cover. Gen. Marshall in uniform standing before a map of the northern hemisphere from the west coast of Africa east to Burma and north to Siberia.

When George Marshall was a boy in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, his biggest ambition was to own a dog.

--Leonard Mosley, Marshall Hero for Our Times. (1982)

Book cover. Somewhat worse for the wear.

--Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. (1957)

When on September 3rd, 1939, Britain, carrying with her a deeply divided and hesitant France, met Hitler’s invasion of Poland by war, the bulk of her battle fleet had been rearmed against air attack and the first of the great ships laid down in 1936 was within a year of completion.

close to forty thousand men awaited the fall of the city.

--Richard Collier, Duce! A Biography of Benito Mussolini. (1971)

Book cover. Pensive-looking Benito Mussolini, who implemented fascism as a political ideology in the Twentieth Century, thinking that it would make Italy great again. (And how did that work out for them?)

It did not seem a night for revolution. At 6 p.m. the rain had set in, driving the furious gusts across the Tyrrhenian Sea, soaking the men in their gleaming black capes as they crouched on straw before guttering fires. Yet on this October night in 1922, beyond the hills that cradled Rome,

--Mayling Soong Chiang (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek), General Chiang Kai-shek; The Account of the Fortnight in Sian When the Fate of China Hung in the Balance. (1937)

despite the high culture which had existed for centuries, rigidly enveloped her until a short two decades ago, when the revolution that overthrew the Manchu dynasty brought the first breath of emancipation.

thing is essential: he must, if he is to be intellectually honest, keep resolutely in mind the fact that before any existing occidental nation was born, China was venerable with age and was hidebound with restrictive forms of conduct and customs, which,

Book cover and spine. --Mayling Soong Chiang (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek), General Chiang Kai-shek; The Account of the Fortnight in Sian When the Fate of China Hung in the Balance. (1937)

When any Occidental wishes to arrive at a correct and realistic estimate of China, and her problems as they exist today, with the object of comparing them with thee conditions that obtain in occidental countries throughout the world, one important

Book cover. Cross of Lorraine above Banner title, Photo of military statuary depicting warriors of France advancing beneath the wings of a female angel brandishing a sword.

Rear cover of book, with photograph of the youngish General and blurbs that pretty much say, "Meh."

A Quote for the Day

All my life I have thought of France in a certain way. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason.

--Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs: The Call to Honour 1940-1942. (1955)

Book cover. Green cloth with pair of roses (pink) on leafy stem which trails up at an angle to a new rosebud which just beginning to unfurl..

“Middle-class! I’ve no patience!” said Miss Ammah, with her nose nearly horizontal.

--Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Odd of Even? (1908) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #262]

Book cover. Title and Author's name boxed in banner across the top 1/4 of the page.

The evening before Helen Jeffrey’s wedding day, the whole household at the rectory came out to the garden.

--Margaret Deland, John Ward, Preacher (1888) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #263]

5 authors by whom I've read at least 5 books:

Heinlein
Asimov
Faulkner
Churchill
Vonnegut

Book cover. Olive green background. Ornate, oval frame with heraldic-themed elements around a greenish-tinged sepia portrait of a young girl with big hair and arms stretched wide and hands resting on the outer limits of a big-bustled dress.

Man’s inclination to decorate his belongings has always been one of the earliest signs of civilisation.

--Dolores Bacon, Pictures That Every Child Should Know (1909) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #214]

Book cover. Caramel colored cloth cover with the title bannered across the top, underscored with an unassuming filigree design at the left, followed by the author's name in all caps.

When Frederick of Prussia asked a German scholar for the shortest possible proof of the divine origin of Christianity he received this answer: “The Jews, your majesty.”

--Newell Dwight Hillis, The Home School, (1903) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #125]

Book cover. interlaced and vining flowers.

I’d wandered, for a week or more,
Through hills and dells, and doleful green’ry,
Lodging at any carnal door,
Sustaining life on pork, and scenery.

--George A. Baker, Jr., Point Lace and Diamonds (MDCCCXCIII) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #237]

Book cover. Ornate, scalloped Victorian- or Edwardian-looking frame on a patterned field of pinkish five-petaled florets.

-----Pshaw! –said my Aunt Tabithy, --have you not done with dreaming?

--IK. Marvel, Dream Life (1900) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #233]

Cloth-bound book cover. Simple lettering on the spine.

One day I found in my sister’s weekly letter an invitation more urgent than any yet received.

--Susan Chenery, As the Twig is Bent (1901) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #217]

Clothbound book cover. Red with gold lettering on the spine and the image of a Celtic cross.

There is a beautiful Northern legend of a man who loved a good fairy, and wooed her and won her for his wife, and then found that she was no more than a woman after all.

Hall Crane, The Bondman (1908) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #84]

Book cover. Lush hemp plant in full flower, arrayed against a trellis-like background.

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp—with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

--James Lane Allen, The Reign of Law, A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields (1900)

--John E. Jessup, Jr. and Robert W. Coakley, A Guide to the Study and Use of Military History

Book cover. Arranged on a tic-tac-toe grid, nine images relating to the military including Tripod mounted water-cooled machine gun, plumed shako, crossbow, flintlock pistol, drum, Civil War era filed artillery piece, knight's helmet, star-shaped medal suspended from a ribbon, and . . . Aladdin's lamp (!?!).

On 6 June 1944, as the Allied forces began the invasion of Normandy, General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote to his son, then a cadet at the United States Military Academy, that “to be a successful soldier, you must know history.”