[Cervantes on the clinamen]

"The first to deliver his blow was the wrathful Basque, and he did so with such force and fury that if his sword had not twisted in the course of its descent, that stroke alone would have been enough to put an end to the fearful fight and to all our knight's adventures; but fortune, which had better things in store for him, turned his opponent's blade aside so that ..."
-- Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, tr. John Rutherford, Don Quixote, I.9

[Robert Penn Warren on the blessings of parenthood]

"[...] In some ways I reckon it is worse to have a nitwit die on your hands than somebody with good sense, because you feel more responsible. But some people said it was a blessing, Silas being afflicted like he was. And the Nabbs had Alec, who wasn't but about three years old then.
"Alec turned out to have good sense, all right. And they never tried to teach him about turning the other cheek like they did Silas. [...]"
-- Robert Penn Warren, "A Christian Education"