Patrick

“The mighty sturgeon has his pool; The stork upon the dam makes his habitation. Fish in scaly armour, Birds in serried plumes, find protection. In my distress I question that inscrutable expanse: O bowels of earth! O boundless sky! Will ye not hearken to my cry? Above, the twinkling Milky Way; The air cold, Slanting moonlight, The water-clock sunk past midnight. My restless heart grieves still;”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears

“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

“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: The Dreamer Wakes

“people undertake some new task not because of a challenge, but because of the assumed absence of a challenge because the task looks easy…and then, once they are stuck with it, they have willy-nilly to overcome the unsuspected difficulties—and sometimes they even succeed.”
― Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed