Eric Byrd

“[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

“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

“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

“Arrested and imprisoned, Madame du Barry was judged and condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal at the end of 1793. She was the only woman, amongst the numbers of women who perished in those days, who was unable to face the scaffold; she wept, she implored mercy from the horrible crowd which surrounded her, and that crowd was so affected by her entreaties that the executioner hastened to put an end to her agony. I am convinced that had the victims of that awful time not died so courageously, the Terror would have ceased much sooner.”
― Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Memoirs of Madame Vigee Lebrun