Quotes About Interpretation

The only history that matters is the history we know.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History is an argument without end.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

In my world, history comes down to language and art.

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.