My Dear Hamilton Quotes

“But the measure of a man, of a life, of a union of man and wife or even country is not in the falling. It’s in the rising back up again to repair what’s broken, to put right what’s wrong. Your father and I did that. We always did that. He never stopped trying until the day he died. And neither will I.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton: Wife, Widow, and Warrior in Alexander Hamilton’s Quest for a More Perfect Union

“The promise of liberty is not written in blood or engraved in stone, it's embroidered into the fabric of our nation.”
― Laura Kamoie, My Dear Hamilton

“Because the people we love are not entirely knowable. Even to themselves. But we love them anyway.

The only other choice is to live without love, alone.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“Silence is often the only weapon available to ladies. And I wield mine expertly.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“But I think it better, in times like these, for us to acknowledge that marriage is a choice, one made, every day, anew.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“The opposite of love, I thought, was not hatred, but indifference, and for my own survival, I’d made my heart indifferent to Alexander Hamilton.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“They'd murdered my husband. They'd taken him from me. But I still had his words, and they were my solace. Hamilton could still speak to me through those pages. His love letters. His Ideas. His essays. Thousands of pages.
They could kill him, but they couldn't silence him. Not if his story was told. Not if his work was preserved. And I resolved to collect the pieces of the legacy Alexander left behind.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“I never was a beauty. It was only that, until a few days ago, Alexander had made me feel like one.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“A marriage is like a union of states, requiring countless dinner table bargains to hold it together. There may be irreconcilable differences brewing below the surface that can come to open rupture. And there is, in a marriage, as in a nation, a certain amount of storytelling we do to make it understood. Even if those stories we tell to make our marriage, or country, work don't paint the whole picture, they're still true. But to leave Alexander Hamilton out of the painting entirely is a lie.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“Because words were his weapon; silence was mine. And he couldn’t win an argument if I didn’t start one.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“No one wanted to serve anymore. Not when, under our new government, any man, whether a gentleman or a scoundrel, could say whatever he pleased and print whatever libels he wished without consequence. And the ignorant populists, spewing tobacco juice as they ranted, took full advantage. As if the notion that all men were created equal somehow meant that one need not aspire to knowledge and ability—all distinctions of class, breeding, or merit discarded, all notions of civility deserted.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“I was someone before I met Alexander Hamilton.
Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman.
But I was a patriot.
I was no unformed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That's important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences - the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him.
I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, duty, and honor in the face of betrayal.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“Angelica had been right. Love was a thing beyond reason, beyond control. A thing almost predestined. And now that this powerful emotion had finally taken hold of me, I was entirely helpless against it.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“What a high-minded thing revolution had seemed when it started; but now I wondered if, in trying to bring about liberty, we’d instead opened the gates of endless war, bloodshed, and immorality.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“But any parent who has lost a child will tell you that grief is a monster less vanquished than held at bay. That, like love, survival is a choice to be made anew every morning, and sometimes one must pretend at being healed just to get through the day.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“I was someone before I met Alexander Hamilton" ~ Betsy Schuyler”
― Laura Kamoie, My Dear Hamilton

“Though the natural weakness of her body hinders her from doing what men can perform, she has a mind as valiant and as active for the good of her country as the best of us. - Plutarch”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton

“But, thankfully, fiction can go where historians rightly fear to tread.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“For I find inside myself love where I'd not expected it to be. Both for a flawed nation and a flawed man. *Love*. A thing so powerful it can overcome the divide of time and death. It's still there inside me, like an eternal flame, though the light it casts is different now.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“Maybe liberty must always be fought for. And you have kept fighting when others laid down their swords in defeat, or exhaustion, or corruption.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“the people we love are not entirely knowable. Even to themselves. But we love them anyway.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“I found that I couldn't ask the questions I wanted to ask for fear of the answers.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“MEN THINK STITCHERY the most demure of occupations—all they see is gently bred girls, their heads bent in domestic pursuit, their hands kept busy and out of mischief. But my mother knew sewing circles for the wheels of conspiracy that they actually are.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“We laughed, thinking it quite a wonderful thing to be envied. In those heady, happy days, we'd not learned yet that envy is a poison to which none are immune...”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“Then, Jefferson, Burr, Madison, and Monroe had buried my family, captured my government, and claimed its flag. But it didn’t belong to any of them more than it belonged to me. And I should never have allowed them to steal it away.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“I could hear no more. I couldn't see, couldn't think, couldn't speak. This couldn't be happening again. How could it possibly be happening again? Was I, like my eldest daughter, caught in some delusion, except in my waking dream everyone I loved was to be taken from me?”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“Perhaps democracy would always naturally devolve to a state when only a man like Burr—a greedy libertine without any care for what the world might say about him—would stand for election. For what gentleman could ever”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton: Wife, Widow, and Warrior in Alexander Hamilton’s Quest for a More Perfect Union

“Anger, after all, does not obliterate love,”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“No one wanted to serve anymore. Not when, under our new government, any man, whether a gentleman or a scoundrel, could say whatever he pleased and print whatever libels he wished without consequence.”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton

“the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, Ian Mumpton and Danielle Funiciello, who provided copies of letters and answered a thousand questions, large and small. Though any errors you may find in this manuscript are ours alone. Thanks also go to the Daughters of the American Revolution and their magazine for providing research material of interest for subjects like Sinterklaas and Dutch culture in Eliza’s time. Lars Hedbor for helping to nitpick the historical accuracy of everything from coffee to French uniforms. Alison Morton and Annalori Ferrell for”
― Stephanie Dray, My Dear Hamilton