Quotes About Narrative

If every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust,[Adolf] Hitler's attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view. Or, at any rate, the victors' version is given prominence and holds the field.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.

History is the memory of things said and done.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Not only is history written by the winners, it is also made by them.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

History is a story written by the finger of God.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

It is the winners who write history - their way.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

History's just one darn thing after another.

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.

History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.