James Sinks

“Always, always, he was holding something. He held his students' attention when they drooped, sleepy with cheap beer, sunlight, tennis. He held a dictionary in his lap. He held the Culhua Mexica in his head, the way a politician holds his constituents: he knew the provincial governors, the secretaries, the tax collectors, the high priests, and he tried to keep track of what they all wanted, so that he could read between the lines of their letters, which were full of strange formalities and equally strange abruptnesses.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

“Ideas and theories, I have suggested, are like quicksilver in our hands. We can lose an idea altogether by being too tight fisted or too open handed, but if we carry an idea we cannot avoid imposing our own shape upon it. And when we do, we ought to know what we have done, for only in this way does the practice of history raise the consciousness of us all.”
― H.C. Erik Midelfort, Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany: A Ship of Fools

“War without fire is like sausages without mustard.”
― Henry V

“The interest shown at the beginning of the twentieth century in Parisian and Burgundian court illumination, which seemed the most perfect and significant aspect of this technique, had led historians to neglect northern productions, which seemed somewhat heavy, even rustic, by comparison with the former. Modern sensibility, influenced by expressionist traditions which western countries are beginning to appreciate, is allowing us a better understanding of the true quality of this art. The crudeness is due in part to economic problems: the absence of wealthy patronage and the need for cheapness. But it was also a matter of principle, of preferring the spontaneity of a gesture, the immediacy of an expressive form, to exactness and miniature description.”
― Albert Châtelet