Quotes about History

I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes.

All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction

Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?

I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.

And she says you cant change history and that ruins should be left to ruin. And she's right. But that the craft of stonemasonry should be allowed to vanish from this world is just not negotiable for me. Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He'll find me.

We're all of us pretty much an assemblage of memories.

She was old; millions of years old, she felt.

The Italians are called Children of the Sun. They might better be called Children of the Shadow. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.

The real war will never get in the books.

not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.