Forgotten Lives Quotes

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

When a person go to jail, what people don't realize is you're alive, but you're dead to the world. People forget about you. When you go to jail, you're a story.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

It's quite sad to see how many people I've known over that years that just die off, you know like wilted flowers. Well, there's something to be said for flowers in the dustbin.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Every year, I am reminded of the kids who aren't in the freshman class and aren't graduating. I remember every single one of them. That is the worst of times for me, to see the future snuffed out.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

Of those that spin out trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinions of their own importance, and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.

There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.