Mary A

“When you take a step back, it makes sense that the 4–7 zone is the safest place to be. When we are engaging in moderate feelings, thinking and behaviour, we are being rational and therefore least likely to become overwhelmed or disengaged.”
― Colman Noctor, The 4-7 Zone: An easy and effective way to live a balanced life – and stay out of the therapist’s office

“He [William of Tyre] does not give much credit to the notion that the women he writes about were individuals as complex as the men, and he prefers to cast women as literary tropes rather than depict them as living, breathing humans.”
― Katherine Pangonis, Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule

“Let’s finish our shared journey through these pages by letting your guard down. Push against the impossible, and perform a quantum shift back in time to the Pleistocene. Close your eyes and pick a world: a grassy plain under cool winter sun; a warm forest track, soft loam underfoot; or a now-sunken rocky coast, gulls’ cries salting the air. Now listen, step forward, she’s here […]Neanderthal. Human. Kindred.”
― Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

“And God was angry with His people of Somerset so that, in the year of Our Lord 1154. pm the day after the feast of Saint Stephen, He caused an earthquake that it might punish them for their sins…” Thus wrote Brother Caradoc in Saint Michael’s chapel in top of Glastonbury Tor, to which he’d scrambled, gasping and sobbing, so as to escape the devastation that God with his earthquake had wrought on everything below it.”
― Ariana Franklin, Grave Goods