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Roberto Calasso
“[the true historian's] desired prey is primarily what has eluded memory and what has had every reason to elude it. After lengthy training in this struggle with the opaque, he will be able to test himself against Plutarchan figures, who are, in contrast, obscured by an excess of testimony - that thick carapace history secretes to keep them remote from us. And the end of his arrogant rise, the historian wants to meet Napoleon as if the latter were a stranger. At this point he becomes part visionary, and can muster the insolence to begin a book as Léon Bloy did: 'The history of Napoleon is surely the most unknown of all histories.”
Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
“I always went alone to the palaces where collections of pictures and statues were exhibited, so as not to have my enjoyment spoiled by stupid remarks or questions. All these palaces are open to strangers, and much gratitude is due to the great Roman nobles for being so obliging. It may seem hard to believe, but it is true that one might spend one's whole life in palaces and churches.”
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Edmund Wilson
“The childhood and youth of the Bakunins were passed in an atmosphere of fantasy, of tender emotions and intellectual excitement, which sounds like Turgenev or Chekhov.”
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

François-René de Chateaubriand
“When, in the silence of abjection, no sound remains except the rattle of the slave’s chain and the informer’s voice; when everyone trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to curry his favor as to incur his disapproval, the historian appears, entrusted with the wrath of nations. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already been born within the Empire.”
François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815

Denis Diderot
“This is how I spend my time. A eight o'clock, dark or light, I get up. I have my two cups of tea. Fair weather or foul, I open my window and take the air. Then I shut myself up and read...Those writers who can charm away our boredom, who ravish us from ourselves, whom nature has endowed with a magic wand which no sooner touches us than we forget our troubles and the light enters the dark places of the soul and we are reconciled to living - they are the only true benefactors of humanity.”
Denis Diderot, Lettres à Sophie Volland

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