Pete Hamill Quotes

History happens to one person at a time.

Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

Part of being an artist is being able to write about the world you live in and the times that you've been a part of.

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

Completeness is rare in history.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

I swear, you are the only person I know who makes decisions based on what will provide the best material for a diary.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.