'Across Five Aprils' Quotes

Across Five Aprils, by Irene Hunt, is a work of historical fiction. The novel is told in third-person limited, and it involves the American Civil War conflict. Here are a few quotes.

• "But this separation, Wilse, it won't do. We're a union; separate, we're jest two weakened, puny pieces, each needin' the other."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 2
  
  
• "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?"
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 2
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 3
  
  
• "I won't fight fer arrogance and big money aginst the southern farmer. I won't do it."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 3
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 6
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 6
  
  
• "Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 6
  
  
• "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?"
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 7
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 7
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 9
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 10
  
  
• "Lincoln will win. When it comes to the final vote, the country will not admit that its sons have died for nothing."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 11
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 12
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 12
  
  
• "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."
  - Irene Hunt, Across Five Aprils, Ch. 12