I’ll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
For years, the place I really lived – the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about – was 15th-century France. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
I’m always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I’ve struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
It’s hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don’t know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you’re in charge of running a country, you’re under scrutiny all the time. That’s a trap. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years’ War and of history. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I’ve never had the sense I was ‘making up’ a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote
I remember seeing my father only twice as a child for brief visits. As I grew up, I invented a father who was larger than life – stronger, smarter, more handsome, and even holier than other men. Kathryn Harrison Read Quote