Quotes from Natalie Zemon Davis

I have two goals. First, that readers be interested, drawn by a historical account, amused by its comic aspects, saddened by the tragic elements, captured by the possibilities of the past; and second, that readers be aware that there could be another way of looking at things besides the one I offer. I'm not giving a lesson or a sermon, I'm offering a dialogue, as I said before.

I have a penchant, an appetite for writing lives, even unhappy ones, in the course of which the person holds on to a certain dignity up to the end, in spite of the disappointments, the things unfinished, the suffering…

Nuestros libros, en cuanto dejan nuestras manos, tienen vida propia.

Montaigne admits to getting carried away in the heat of an argument, exaggerating the naked truth by the vigor of his words. Yet we all insist upon our opinions, forcing them upon others by iron and fire. Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure, to be an apprentice at sixty than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.

In later years I never put aside this kind of inquiry, that is, into the modes of thinking and representation embedded in a text, but I asked new questions about ways of writing and the forms and rituals of discourse. I began to look not only at what was stated or declared in a text, but also at what was suggested through expression, through performance.