Alfred de Vigny Quotes

Most of us get our history through story.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

I'm a storyteller; that is what I do. And I'm particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

History: Gossip well told.

History is simply man’s desperate bid to give substance to his most visionary dreams.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

There's no longevity in me telling old stories on the radio.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.