“Finding his mind so filled with “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” he [Montaigne] decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born.”

—  Sarah Bakewell , book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 31.

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English author and curator 1963

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