Cora

“she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“One should nevertheless not fall into the old stereotype of an organization that kept its place in Spanish society by sheer terror. Certainly the Inquisition used torture and executed some of its victims, but so did nearly all legal systems in Europe at the time, and it is possible to argue that the Spanish Inquisition was less bloodthirsty than most – as we will see, it showed a healthy scepticism about witches and put a stop to witch-persecution where it could”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation