Across Five Aprils Quotes

Quote 1: "A tall powerfully built youth of twenty, with a firm mouth and grave, dark eyes that [give] him the appearance of an older man," Shad is the local schoolmaster from Philadelphia. Chapter 1, pg. 10

Quote 2: "War [means] loud brass music and shining horses ridden by men wearing uniforms finer than any suit in the stores at Newton; it [means] men riding like kings, looking neither to the right nor the left." Chapter 1, pg. 15

Quote 3: "It would be shadowy men from distant parts who [die] for the pages of future history books." Chapter 1, pg. 15

Quote 4: "But this separation, Wilse, it won't do. We're a union; separate, we're jest two weakened, puny pieces, each needin' the other." Chapter 2, pg. 29

Quote 5: "Slavery, I hate. But it is with us, and them that should suffer fer the evil they brought to our shores air long dead. What I want us to answer in this year of 1861 is this, John: does the trouble over slavery come because men's hearts is purer above the Mason-Dixon line? Or does slavery throw a shadder over greed and keep that greed from showin' up quite so bare and ugly?" Chapter 2, pg. 31

Quote 6: "I don't know if anybody ever 'wins' a war, Jeth. I think that the beginnin's of this war has been fanned by hate till it's a blaze now; and a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt. There oughtn't to be a war, Jeth; this war ought never to ha'bin." Chapter 3, pg. 41

Quote 7: "I won't fight fer arrogance and big money aginst the southern farmer. I won't do it." Chapter 3, pg. 45

Quote 8: "You tell Jeth that bein a soljer aint so much." Chapter 4, pg. 50

Quote 9: "The accounts you read in newspapers today will fill the pages of history by the time you're a man." Chapter 4, pg. 62

Quote 10: "There isn't trouble enough in this country for you, is there, Guy? You'd better get out and do your patriotic duty--kick up some more mob violence. That's your forte, you know; get in on any killing you can drum up, so long as your own hide is safe." Chapter 5, pg. 76

Quote 11: "He [is] still too much a child, still insufficiently acquainted with violence, to believe that bodily harm could possibly come to him. Ugly things happened, it was true, but to people who were distant, unknown people--not to someone named Jethro Creighton." Chapter 5, pg. 85

Quote 12: "Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field." Chapter 6, pg. 92

Quote 13: "A letter is kind of a close thing; it's somebody's words that are writ only fer you. It's like you're bein' unfair to someone you love if you let his words be read by others when he writ'em only fer you." Chapter 6, pg. 101

Quote 14: "Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons." Chapter 6, pg. 104

Quote 15: "Ain't we in the right? And how does it happen, if we're in the right, that the Lord lets Jeff Davis get men like Lee and Jackson and gives us ones like McClellan and Halleck?" Chapter 7, pg. 118

Quote 16: "I tell you frankly that the contagion of their devotion has not yet gripped me. I do not dislike him...But he is afraid of something--of sending the men who love him to their death--of making an error that will reflect upon the image of himself which he knows to exist in the minds of his men. He does not have the cold approach to killing, the singleness of purpose, the brutal tenacity, that the winner of this war--if there ever is to be one--must have." Chapter 8, pg. 125

Quote 17: "Then a skeleton came out from among the trees. It was the skeleton of a Union soldier, though the uniform it wore was so ragged and filthy it was difficult to identify. The sunken cheeks were covered with a thin scattering of fuzz; the hair was lank and matted. It fell over the skeleton's forehead and down into its eyes." Chapter 9, pg. 134

Quote 18: "If it be a wrong [decision], I have then erred on the side of mercy." Chapter 9, pg. 147

Quote 19: "It was a battle of unbelievable bravery and unbelievable ruthlessness; it was a clash of agonizing errors checkered with moves of brilliant strategy that lasted through three hot July..." Chapter 10, pg. 152

Quote 20: "Lincoln will win. When it comes to the final vote, the country will not admit that its sons have died for nothing." Chapter 11, pg. 168

Quote 21: "It was then that South Carolina knew the lash of a triumphant army drunk with the plundering of Georgia and enraged at the stubborn tenacity of the South in holding onto a cause that was already lost. In South Carolina the vast, undisciplined army could find another excuse for its excesses." Chapter 12, pg. 177

Quote 22: "This is a land lying in destruction, physical and spiritual. If the twisted railroads and the burned cities and the fields covered with the bones of dead men--if that were all, we could soon rise out of the destruction. But the hate that burns in old scars, and the thirst for revenge that has distorted men until they should be in straitjackets rather than in high office--these are the things that may make peace a sorry thing." Chapter 12, pg. 179

Quote 23: "It was the saddest and most cruel April of the five. It had held out an almost unbelievable joy and had then struck out in fury at those whose hands were outstretched." Chapter 12, pg. 184