Quotes About History

When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.

History is the angle at which realities meet.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

Old hospitals with saints' names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven't forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.

What did I read just the other day? there are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book.' I looked at my son. I said, 'Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty0four hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?

What did I read just the other day? there are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book.' I looked at my son. I said, 'Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?

The tremendous bruising force of history, sometimes random, often without logic or resolution, may produce a work of fiction that leans for its effectiveness on structure and pattern, on a detailed unraveling of some old perplexity or anxiety, some lingering confusion out there, in three dimensions, where the blood is thick and real but the gunshots can go uncounted.

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.

How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

It must be deeply satisfying for you. The college is internationally known as a result of Hitler studies. It has an identity, a sense of achievement. You've evolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. It's what I want to do with Elvis.

He is saying terror is what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

How is Hitler? Fine, solid, dependable.

He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history.

Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. Skeuomorphic designs are often comfortable for traditionalists, and indeed the history of technology shows that new technologies and materials often slavishly imitate the old for no apparent reason except that is what people know how to do. Early

Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?

your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.