Women From England

"‘What's the verdict?’ ‘A shining new talent. A breathtaking story, written with mystical intensity. An author who will sell and sell.’"

"Never lend if you need repayment; never give where you want a return."

"'Do you kill people?' 'Not regularly. It's too much trouble making my peace with the gods afterwards.'"

"Not all the fine civic building programmes in the world would ever displace the raw forces that drive most of humankind. This was the true city: greed, corruption and violence."

"Smartness always helps in gaining access to the houses of the wealthy. Anyone with a clean face is acceptable to thugs."

"The sands of time are sinking The dawn of heaven breaks; The summer morn I've sighed for, The fair, sweet morn, awakes. Dark, dark hath been the midnight, But dayspring is at hand, And glory, glory dwellth In Immanuel's hand"

"Finding his mind so filled with “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” he [Montaigne] decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born."

"Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one."

"The hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him [Montaigne]. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline."

"The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast milk, so that be would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre [Montaigne’s father] had “people of the lowest class” hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. H felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary."

"The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else."

"Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”"

"The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”"

"The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."

"As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you."

"Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called “On Tranquility of Mind,” he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequence that people usually avoided by keeping busy—that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way."

"The great stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to “find themselves,” as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to being the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne developed reservations about the second part of this, but there is no doubt about his interest in contemplating life. He wrote: “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.”"

"From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty."

"Oh, it's quite all right, we curse quite a lot around here."

"Poetry is like time travel, and poems take us to the heart of the matter"

"As a half-resident of Wiltshire I feel very loyal to the county."

"There are lots of things I do feel strongly about, but if I speak about them I will be on my best behaviour."

"In a world where so many things have changed for the better, there are –sadly - still many vulnerable, forgotten and neglected children. Each one of them has a unique story"

"Oh, oh, very badly. I would love to start again but maybe I’m too old"

"Being a friendly neighbour has always been the keystone of community life and just saying “hello” can sometimes make a huge difference"

"Reading is exciting. Reading is fun. Reading is cool. There is nothing quite like the thrill of opening a book and being drawn into another world to meet new people and to discover their stories - it’s like making new friends"

"My grandfather, P Morton Shand, […] declared that ‘A woman who cannot make soup should not be allowed to marry’. You might not agree with his rants, but there was no doubting his passion for proper food"

"What I have learned from my travels is that by listening at least as much as we speak, and by trying to understand before we act, we perhaps stand a better chance of coming up with the right answers…"

"English students don't spend much time on their studies. They're more interested in partying and having fun."

"I think, the people around home are very supportive to us and those are the people who really matter to us, our close friends and close family and I think if they feel you are doing the right thing you can only be true to yourself and you sort of have to ignore a lot of what's said, obviously take it on board, but you have to be yourself really and that's how I have stuck by it really."

"Myself, I wish her well and also wish I could whisper to her: If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don't want or need another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated system. Do yourself a favor and save what you can: Leave the throne to the awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it."

"I really hope I can make a difference, even in the smallest way. I am looking forward to helping as much as I can."

"I think if you do go out with someone for quite a long time you do get to know each other very, very well. You go through the good times, you go through the bad times, both personally and within a relationship as well."

"...we easily fall into the habit of accepting compressed statements which save us from the trouble of thinking. Thus arises what I shall call ‘Potted Thinking’."

"A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system."

"A mind in blinkers is a mind that is unfree."

"Perceiving involves more than being sensibly aware of something present to the senses; it involves the activity of perceiving. This is the activity of a person, and in perceiving, the whole person is involved, not merely one or other of his sense organs."

"We are content to accept without testing any belief that fits in with our prejudices and whose truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our desires."

"There are many ways of being wrong, but only one way of being right."

"We must face the unfortunate fact that we are moved to the acceptance of beliefs by factors that are wholly irrelevant to their truth."

"...potted thinking is easily accepted, is concentrated in form, and has lost the vitamins essential to mental nourishment."

"I am convinced of the urgent need for democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognised ignorance. Our failures in thinking in part due to our faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise."

"Magic. Magic had happened to him. He knew it would one day. He had always believed in magic, even whe the others had laughed at him, laughed because he was the eldest and ought to know better."

"When she saw the children jumping first upon one bare foot and then upon the other, she envied them and wished that she, too, could run barefooted for a little while. For a little while. She was a royal child. She knew that golden shoes pinch and there is no escaping them."

"Why think of anything at all but the pretty, gentle child sitting high upon the white horse! So women holding up their children to see her pass cried blessings on her head, the easy blessings of a crowd, that may turn at any moment to curses. And there were wenches in plenty, who, seeing the little Queen in cloth of gold and the King at her side, handsome Richard, wished themselves, no doubt, in her place."

"Nobody seemed to know where the King was. He was at Windsor choosing new furnishings for the little Queen's rooms; he was hunting at Eltham; he was at Leeds Castle; he was at Havering. He was here, he was there, restless as quicksilver. Certainly I never set eyes on him. I was disappointed. And yet I was relieved, too. It was common talk that the King's moods shifted this way and that you never knew what to expect."

"I think hawking is the nearest thing to flying in this world. There you sit high up and poised light as air, the horse swift beneath you. You unhood your bird, let the jesses go and watch your falcon, its bells a-jingle, like some wild spirit take the air … and your own spirit goes with it."

"I was a lonely child though there were children in plenty on our land. But my nurse forbade me to play with them. She guarded my dignity; more than my mother, indeed, who being so great a lady took dignity for granted. But in any case there was little time for them to play. There was work for even the smallest upon our land; some of our peasants had run away, tempted by ever-rising wages. Wages fixed by law were certainly low; but, like many another ruined in the French wars, we had no money to pay a penny more than the law laid down. All over the country men were running away from their masters and the land lost as many laborers as by the Black Death itself."

"There is no magic when one no longer believes."

"Earth and fire and water and air We solemnly promise, we solemnly swear Not a word, not a hint, not a sound to declare Earth and fire and water and air!"