-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

Ao sairmos para o anoitecer dourado das ruas bizantinas, refleti como era estranho que, mesmo sob as circunstâncias mais extraordinárias, durante episódios mais perturbadores da vida, nos lugares mais distantes de casa e de tudo que nos é familiar, possam existir esses momentos de incontestável alegria.

Faith is simply whatever is real to us.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

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

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

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

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

Recently abandoned women can be complicated.

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 leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

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?

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 for us with its shadowy claws.

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 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 elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

... I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.

I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me'.

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.

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.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

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 and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight.

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.

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.

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

This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn't know when the next one was coming.

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-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

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.