“While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.”

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

Did you see The Never-Ending Story? That’s one kick-ass dragon. It’s basically a giant puppy dragon.

The ideas always have to be in service of the story. And that’s what Scott and the writers did – they weren’t trying to beat you over the head with an idea; they had a story they wanted to tell, and they had ideas

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

We [me and friends] like to have surprising stories, but the dynamic and the friendship is the same.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word “myth” only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.