Eric Byrd

“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

“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

“Then Montesquieu was mentioned, and somebody described his first love-affair, a Baudelairean love-affair with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquieu was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client.”
― Edmond de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals

“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