Quotes About Events

the historian treats ideas seriously and does not regard them as completely subservient to events and possessing no life of their own (for in that case there would be no point in studying them), but he does not believe that they can endure from one generation to another without some change of meaning.

Modern history might be told by a succession of dinners.

It's called Littlewood's law.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

I love the energy and urgency of working in news.

I don't believe in 50 friends. I believe in a smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It's the most senseless use of time.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to historical events, so to get the chance to research our family history using our DNA was too good an opportunity to pass up.

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

Unlike some, I don't claim to hold the mystic key to the future. But judging from past events, it seems to me that those who want to prophesy the imminent end of America's unique global role have a harder case to make than those who think we will limp on for a while, making a mess of things as usual.

I was a valet for celebrity parties.

Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola's famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.

Talith confronted the self-contained prince she recalled much too clearly from the tumultuous events that surrounded a failed coronation.

History is just one damn fact after another

plans are all well and good in the Summer, but in the Winter it's wise to simply have an objective.' 'I thought we were meant to make a plan and stick to it?' 'Events move fast,' he said, 'and you need on-the-hoof flexibility to ensure the plan doesn't get in the way of the goal.' It actually seemed like quite good advice.

Show me any major event on this planet, and I will show you the economic reason behind it. Commerce is all powerful, Miss Strange. Commerce rules our lives.

All of us are somewhat clairvoyant; any future you can dream up, no matter how bizarre, retains the faint possibility of coming true. Kevin's skill was of dreaming up future events that were not just possible, but likely. He once said, Being a clairvoyant is ten percent guesswork and ninety percent probability mathematics.

Segmentar la historia es realizar un ejercicio arbitrario; en rigor, es imposible precisar el origen exacto de un acontecimiento histórico, igual que es imposible precisar su exacto final: todo acontecimiento tiene su origen en un acontecimiento anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y así hasta el infinito, porque la historia es como la materia y en ella nada se crea ni se destruye: sólo se transforma.

What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.

Simulating enzymes. They create false biological events. They simulate a virus, a viral attack, thus triggering a reaction from antibodies, though since these have no target, there being no virus to destroy, they turn back against their own source. Let us celebrate this irruption of simulation within biology and wait to see where it will lead.

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

We can bear ideas and events only when laundered by commentary, like the dirty money concealed by banking secrecy. 'In the heart and the belly it continues to sing its poisonous song - Better to kill a child than to harbour unsatisfied desires within oneself' (Kenzaburo Oe). Ressentiment is an empty, useless passion only if it assumes a sentimental form.