There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence - Rebecca West

It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible.

That taught me a lesson I've always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.

There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.