“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.” IfsThinkingHumansWarEnoughMomentsPainGraceCircumstancesBlessedSavedNarrativeDescriptionCatastropheAdequateSequenceOutrageInexplicable Book:Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World Source: Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World
“Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.” ShouldMomentsFictionBreakWaveDialogueNarrativeShoreReservedSprayWatchers Book:The Writing of Fiction Source: The Writing of Fiction