There is a great charm about it all; but it is the art of a civilization that has outlived its political basis, and art of wistful nostalgia for which there was not future. The paintings in the Pantassa at Mistra formed the last important monument of the medieval free Greek world.
S. Runciman, Lost capital of Byzantium (1980), 95-6
All we know of him [Andrew, governor of the Peloponnese] is that he was appointed by 'the pious Emperor Andronicus' - the epithet fits Andronicus II better than Andronicus III, who was not very pious, but it was often given formally to emperors, regardless of their characters - and that he was the father of a saint, Leontius of Achaea, who was noted for his good works later in the century.
S. Runciman, Lost capital of Byzantium (1980), 48
The Cassington Scholar is traditionally given to a free thinker. It's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof it exists , but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
P. Pullman, Northern Lights (1995), 372-3
Those fields were the special joy of Mark Ukacierra. They bore witness to the power of the Kanun. Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed, and contrarily there were families who did just the opposite, putting off the redemption of blood from season to season and from year to year, to gather enough corn to be able to cloister themselves for a long time. You a free to choose between keeping your dignity as a man and losing it, the Kanun said. Each man must choose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn, others, on the contrary, vengeance.
I. Kadare, Broken April (1982), 147
If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen for the three centuries of her engagement with slavery. With the revamp of Carolina Golden rice and other heirloom varieties and hybrids thereof, the narrative of rice in the South has been centred in the rebirth of one of its most important cash crops as a boutique ingredient.
M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 241
Now you can get everything you want, but back them a gumbo meant something - it told you what time it was.
You don't just make a gumbo, you build one. I don't just throw everything in the pot at once after the roux - it's the stock I make and the order I put the crab or shrimp or chicken in. You know a good gumbo because it has layers. You can taste each level the chef has put into it. The rice is important too; each grain has to be separate.
Chef Henderson in Mobile, quoted in M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 196
This is not a hobby. Look, for many white Americans, genealogy is a hobby, it gets them out of the house, gives them something to enjoy researching. With African American genealogy, it's more about social justice, regaining a heritage denied. Every African American living today is stolen African history embodied.
M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 85
