Michael Dennis

“To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“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

“It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version. Women outnumbered men because men were killed off in the wars; men outnumbered women because women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were filthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed baths in the village bathhouses. The list could be extended indefinitely.”
― Barbara Tuchman

“Oh, how I wish -- and here Jane astonished herself with the vehemence of her own feelings -- how I wish that once, just once in my life, I could see Emma Woodhouse receive a real set-down!”
― Joan Aiken, Jane Fairfax