Quotes About History

Lord Frederick had been a stalwart member of the Montagne court since at least the time of my grandfather; this I knew. Even more, he had the marvellous ability to pull peppermint drops from my ears, which used to entertain me for hours.

Harriet Garner (as she appears in the marriage register) or Gardner (as reported in the newspaper's wedding announcement) married Benjamin Williamson on July 13, 1822. If Garner was Harriet Hemings, she made her decision about her future livelihood quickly but well.

Legends, then, are seldom formed out of thin air. They grow out of something real. That original something may be extremely different from the final legend, but the kernel of truth is there nevertheless.

The house, it's already been a-settin' here for a hundred years. It'll be right here tomorrow. It's today I must be livin'.

The history of Lenin's train is not exclusively the property of the Soviets. In part, it is a parable about great-power intrigue, and one rule there is that great powers almost always get things wrong.

the sound of tramping feet beat out a requiem for the old world - but no one could be sure where it might lead

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream.

Meaning…they say the best way to judge what a man will do is by looking at what he's done in the past.

She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son's life that she had missed, but that much she'd known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.

You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly but fuck one horse and you will be a horse fucker for all eternity.

Lincoln's smile could have scared rattlesnakes.

In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

Old things have strange hungers.

Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.

no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.

That's how it goes—as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago.

They knew all about the war with France from Papa's magazines. But whenever they tried to imagine what a war was actually like, it unfolded in their heads like a cross between a chess game, a horse race, a country dance, and a very racy night at the theater.

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said, 'Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan't be ashamed if they're not.

He ran like if he kept running he could escape the last thousand years.