Human aspiration is often blind, its motto: I want, therefore I will have. - Tanith Lee

White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled.

On the threshold of the inner court, where the marriage was to be, priests made offerings at the household altars, to the gods, who, as always, paid no attention.

The groaning and the screaming, the prayers—useless and known to be useless—the exhortations, scrabbling attempts at exodus, the burrowings that would yield no safety, the ecstasies of madness and immolation—each and all occurred: the correct paraphernalia of catastrophe. But, seen from the heavens, what was it but a fomentation in a hill of termites? That which is so small cannot be important.