Quotes About History

Historical fiction is a hybrid, a blending of reported reality, reasonable speculation, psychological truth, and the author's imagination.

Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory

The rules of writing history mean that a historian can only speculate about her emotions; but a novelist is allowed, indeed obliged, to re-create a version of them. This is where historical fiction—the hybrid form—does something that I find profoundly interesting—takes the historical record and turns it inside out; the inner world explains the outer record.

of the ancient cities of Greece and

She would have come to me if she could, she would have blessed this baby as she blessed all the others. I had a hard confinement without her here and I expect to miss her for the rest of my life. This baby came into the world just as my mother left it, and so I am naming her for my mother. And I can tell you this-I am absolutely sure that a Tudor Elizabeth is going to be one of the greatest monarchs that England has ever seen.

D'you think I can't write this and get someone-a drunk married to a fool -to swear to it? Do you think I can't sey up as historian? As storyteller? D'you think I can't write a history which years from now everyone will believe as the truth? I am the king. Who shall write the record of my reign if not me? 'You can say anything you like' I say levelly. 'Of course you can. You're King of England. But it doesn't make it true.

There will be a child, but no child. There will be a king but no king. There will be a virgin queen all-forgotten. There will be a queen but no virgin. [And Lord Robert Dudley? he whispered.] He will have the making of a prince who will change the history of the world, I whispered in reply. And he will die, beloved by a queen, safe in his bed.

The laws against Jews, their enforced separation in villages, the prejudicial traditions against them and the regular assaults and killing are part of the history of antisemitism that has disgraced Christendom for 2,000 years.

She never thought when she overthrew a queen that thereafter all queens would be unsteady.

Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write, and publish scholarly history.

Really, if it were not for Joan of Arc, I would think that girls are completely useless

Why had I chosen the path of the law? And why law of the kind that seemed to be connected to an unspoken family history? 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,' the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. The invitation from Lviv was a chance to explore those haunting gaps.

Dos 70 ou mais familiares que vivam em Lemberg e Zolkiew quando a guerra começou, o único sobrevivente foi Leon.

C'est compliqué, c'est le passé, pas important.

poet Józef Wittlin inquired in 1946.

Sofka: The Autobiography of a Princess, a book

Norway surrendered after two months of fighting, which had left 1,335 Norwegians killed or wounded.

America's attention had turned to race relations during that winter of 1954-55, largely driven by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the nation's public schools would eventually have to be racially integrated. Crispus Attucks students were studying black history without being fully aware that their basketball team was making it.

Those who have been persecuted are, alas, all too often the persecutors of tomorrow.

The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

La culture, c'est comme la confiture, moins on en a, plus on l'étale.

El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro