Patrick

“I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The Minnow

If I press
on its head,
the eyes
will come out
like stars.
The ripples
it makes
can move
the moon.”
― Frank Stanford, The Singing Knives

“When grief for fiction’s idle words More real than human life appears, Reflect that life itself’s a dream And do not mock the reader’s tears.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone

“Material life, of course, presents itself to us in the anecdotal form of thousands and thousands of assorted facts. Can we call these events? No: to do so would be to inflate their importance, to grant them a significance they never had. That the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian ate with his fingers from the dishes at a banquet (as we can see from a drawing) is an everyday detail, not an event. So is the story about the bandit Cartouche, on the point of execution, preferring a glass of wine to the coffee he was offered. This is the dust of history, microhistory in the same sense that Georges Gurvitch talks about micro-sociology: little facts which do, it is true, by indefinite repetition, add up to form linked chains. Each of them represents the thousands of others that have crossed the silent depths of time and endured.”
― Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol 2: The Wheels of Commerce