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"My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history."
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"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."
"Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself."
"Most of Jesus' life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus's life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus."
"I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today."
"It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery."
"It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history."
"You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know."
"There probably was a time when the idea of having a toilet inside a house was repulsive."
Explore more quotes by Russell Banks
"Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for."
"And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey."
"One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons."
"A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties."
"Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves."
"Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life."
"I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting."
"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature."
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