Quote of the Day

The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of the impalement, but the fact that these things had -- apparently -- actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the "large family" dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understood now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth -- really seen it -- you can't look away.

-- from Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian