From the Commonplace Book

"[T]he historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives, where classes keep overlapping, where what is believed to have happened is as real as what actually happened, a world, moreover, which cannot be defined by technical terms but only described by analogies." --W.H. Auden, quoted in Arthur Kirsch, ed., W.H. Auden: Lectures on Shakespeare xiv (2000)