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Exlpore more History quotes
"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."
"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."
"In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement."
"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."
Explore more quotes by Anatole Broyard
"People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work."
"The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable."
"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave."
"There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience."
"The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles."
"There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form."
"To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding."
"The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self."
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