History Quotes - Page 4

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.

Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.

It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.

Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.

Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.

Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.

Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."

[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.

It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.