Quote of the Day (Thomas Flanagan, on Historical Fiction)

“The voices which only seem to be speaking to us, being in fact our own voices, have been instructed by all that we know about the past, all the contradictory things that we feel about it, all that we have imagined about it. Those voices make possible for us imaginary selves, imaginary opposites, imaginary others. Historical fiction licenses those imaginings in ways that history itself, history proper, does not.”—Thomas Flanagan, “History as Fiction, Fiction as History,” lecture at Berkeley, February 29, 1996, collected in There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill (2004)