top of page
.png){kind=small}
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
Standard
Customized
More
"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"
Writing
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory
"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."
Wisdom
"There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine."
Emotion
"Opera cuts to the chase-as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart."
Art
"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."
Education
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life
"When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again."
Life
"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"
Reflection
More
"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it."
Author Name
Personal Development
bottom of page