This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt...

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

Do you think artists are supposed to be happy? -Everyone is supposed to be. -I said staunchly,and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn’t mind it

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage...

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don’t know.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

Si tuvieras que elegir entre la cordura, tu vida tal como la recuerdas, antes que la verdadera inestabilidad, ,qué elegirías como manera adecuada para vivir de un estudioso?

I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you’ve seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind’s eye?

[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I...

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward...

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.

It’s funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

It’s a shame for a woman’s history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and...

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That’s all you need.

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork […]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life...

It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called “by myself”; I didn’t know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then–...