Quotes About History

Musee de l'Homme.

Life, he told himself, is a palimpsest of expunged experiences.

Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.

That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.

Time had wiped the slate clean.

Dicen que los lugares conservan por lo menos cierta huella de las personas que los han habitado.

Mais, au bout d'un demi-siècle, les quelques personnes qui furent les témoins de vos débuts dans la vie ont fini par disparaître.

Patrick Modiano

Si yo no diera fe de ello, no quedaría huella de la presencia de esa desconocida y de la de mi padre en un coche celular en febrero de 1942, en los Campos elíseos. Sólo serían personas —muertas o vivas— a las que se clasifica en la categoría de "individuos no identificados

trong cu?c ??i, không ph?i t??ng lai mà quá kh? m?i ?áng k?

Patrick Modiano

But it's a tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.

He'd known Lily forever. Or for as long as he could remember, which was basically the same thing.

No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version.

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

The whole room was like a museum of how people lived in olden times.

You are what you remember. You are what you hold on to.

History ain't so important when yer just trying to survive,' I say, spitting it out under my breath. 'That's actually when it's most important.

A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

History ain't so important when yer just trying to survive," I say, spitting it out under my breath. "That's actually when it's most important," Hildy says,

The past always fails those who grasp at it.

Forty-seven generations before, the King of the Southerners had stolen a rhinoceros out of the Northern King's private zoo. (—That's it? —Wars have started for less. —But that's stupid. —Precisely.)

Back in the nineteenth century, chemists used to joke that you could tell who had just discovered elemental fluorine by reading the obituary columns.

Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.