romanticized history Quotes

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

It is the idea of 'People' to treat its material as if it were history and, what is more, as if it were the history of a happy period.

Originally, I thought the story of the Alamo was all these men defending their liberty when they could have left, knowing they were going to die. That's without a doubt what appealed to me, the romance and the nobility. But, as in life, the more you dig the more you find out that things weren't quite like that.

The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia - Chinese historical romances. They're kind of analogous to Western epics. They're based on history, just like 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey' are based on history, but they're romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.

Every previous era looks innocent.

...funny how people want a return to the good ole days. Of coarse the good ole days of being a rich white plantation owner. Everyone seems to forget the poor white farmer.

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats

It doesn't matter how you live and die, it's how the bards wrote it down.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.

I love history. I'm very interested by it and I think it's great to have a movie that brings it alive in a way. It's sort of that romanticized version of it.