Natalie Coffman

“Will it ever be perfect?” I wondered. “No,” he told me with a smile. “Nothing in life is. But, my dear mademoiselle, life is not about achievement. It is about the effort. If one takes pleasure in every step, one enjoys the whole journey.”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Treacherous Curse

“For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, ‘Let me see now, just exactly when was that?’ You ask him this: ‘What was it like? How did you feel?’ And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.”
― William Goldman, Marathon Man

“By this stage, anyone who had quizzed me about the making of this book – assuming they were still listening – must have had a third question forming in their minds, though they were all too polite to pose it. That question, I imagine, was ‘why bother?’ Why devote a sizeable chunk of one’s own life to re-examining the deeds of a man who has been dead for seven centuries? The answer, as I hope the finished product will make clear, is that the reign of Edward I matters.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision,”
― Tara Westover, Educated