Sara Fontana

“(about Pilgrims) It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet, between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter- occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe" hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives from whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toe-hold into a self-sustaining colony.”
― Bill Bryson, Made in America an Informal History Of

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Ma a un dato momento, senza poter nettamente distinguere un contorno, dare un nome a quanto gli piaceva, d'improvviso affascinato, aveva cercato di afferrare la frase o l'armonia, lui stesso non sapeva, che passava e che gli aveva aperto più largamente il cuore come certi profumi di rose, fluttuando nell'umida aria della sera, hanno il potere di dilatare le nostre narici. Forse era stata la sua ignoranza della musica a fargli provare un'impressione così confusa, una di quelle impressioni che forse sono le sole puramente musicali, inattese, compiutamente originali, irreducibili a qualsiasi altro ordine d'impressioni. Un'impressione simile, per un istante, è per così dire sine materia.”
― Marcel Proust, Un Amour De Swann