Quotes About History

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer.

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past?Why are we so proud of ourselves for having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax them.

They say that Cain invented cities. And if it was not he, it was someone else fond of murder.

I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don't see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn't any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: "Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?" - "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough." - Hilary Mantel

istoria nu este trecutul, ci ceea ce r?mâne în ciur dup? ce veacurile au trecut prin el

I can remember the days,' Mirabeau said, 'when we didn't have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

The dead watch us, zealous in old causes.

He gives himself a glass of wine, and another to Wyatt; says, 'Gardiner has people outside the gate, watching who comes and goes. This is a city house, it is not a fortress – but if anybody's here who shouldn't be, my household does enjoy kicking them out. We quite like fighting. I'd prefer to put my past behind me, but I'm not allowed to. Uncle Norfolk keeps reminding me I was a common soldier, and not even in his army.

he and the cardinal agree it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been born more subtle.

Hilary Mantel

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

She's wearing one of the dresses of ... of the people ... who lived here before.

Mother," said Janna, "if the Frosches were here first, why do they have the fourth floor? Why did they not take the one we have?" "The Baron arranged it all," her mother said curtly.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.

This is a moment in history where it is almost hard to catch your breath.

She was the product of her circumstances, of her time and place...

I thought how difficult it was, how impossible all marriages really are, each person coming to battle with separate and complicated histories. It made a case for incest.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

It was all so long ago and Stalin doesn't matter any more. Stalin lost his chic before you were born. Sex is always chic.