Peter Conrad

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it an oblique indirect sample of what it contains or what passes through it a point of view.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.