Historical Narratives Quotes

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

I grew up loving history.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

I've always been fascinated by history.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

History is not was. It is.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

All history, so far as it is not supported by contemporary evidence, is romance.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.