Michael Dennis

“A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side--of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process-- of lawsuits, treaties, moralists' denunciations, literary satire, papal Bills. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.”
― TUCHMAN BARBARA, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little, we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep. In quiet eventless lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Don't meddle in the affairs of wizards,' " he said in lofty tones, " 'for they are subtle and quick to anger.' A fellow sorcerer said that. Good at his job, knew a lot about jewelry. Not bad at fireworks, either. Wasn't the snappy dresser Merlin was, though. Let's see, what his name? Raist--no, that was the irritating young chap, kept hacking and spitting up blood all the time. Disgusting. The other's name was Gand-something or other...”
― Margaret Weis / Tracy Hickman, Elven Star

“She would have been noted for her spontaneity and liveliness of mind if she had been given any kind of education.... Mme de Renal had had enough sense to reject as absurd everything she had learnt at the convent, and to forget it pretty rapidly; but she did not replace it with anything, and ended up totally ignorant.”
― Stendahl, The Red and the Black