Top 98 History And Memory Quotes
#2. I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#3. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
Adam Sisman
#4. This is the biggest cemetery for Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti. It must tell us that we have to come back here again and again. We must keep the memory of the worst crime in human history alive for those who were born later.
Horst Kohler
#5. Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now.
Walter Brueggemann
#6. 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.
Haruki Murakami
#7. They were like two pieces of a failed star, drawn together by a shared history and a memory of illicit kisses.
Cinda Williams Chima
#8. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.
Madame De Stael
#9. There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
#10. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260
Donna Tartt
#11. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
#12. A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Grandma Moses
#13. Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it.
Bruce H. Norton
#14. But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children's history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
Ruth Ozeki
#15. After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
Bob Woodward
#16. Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Margaret Thatcher
#17. Beneath history, memory and forgetting
Beneath memory and forgetting, life.
Paul Ricoeur
#18. I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.
Desmond Tutu
#19. And they all pretend they're Orphans
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget that
History puts a saint in every dream
Tom Waits
#20. Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
#21. 'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
Natasha Trethewey
#22. That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
Paul Beatty
#23. When it made the distinctive screech that only an old country screen door could make, another layer of lead came off his chest. That was a sound of home. Of history and memory and comfort.
Susan Fanetti
#24. He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his,
Jhumpa Lahiri
#25. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
Roger Zelazny
#26. In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.
Michael Crichton
#27. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.
Sefi Atta
#28. Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines "freedom," "truth," "intelligence," "fact," "wisdom," "memory," "history" - all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.
Neil Postman
#29. Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.
Abraham Foxman
#30. There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure - the lunge of a curse, a shared and shattered history, a loved one drowned and lost in the ocean of forgetting.
Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
#31. History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.
Malcolm X
#32. the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.
Lawrence J. Vale
#33. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
Siri Hustvedt
#34. The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance.
Martha Grimes
#35. Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.
Wilhelm Reich
#36. I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.
Haruki Murakami
#37. Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one?s life ... but 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers and 1937 the Kit Kat - these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child in the country.
Roald Dahl
#38. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#39. History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#40. I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it's 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.
Geoff Ryman
#41. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#42. We are nothing if we are not the sum total of our physique and the history of the actions of our physique
that we carry with us in body and in memory. (Body - Michael McClure)
Theodore Roszak
#43. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
Anne Michaels
#44. The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.
p. 30
Danilo Kis
#45. History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
Saul Bellow
#46. The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.
Shireen Jeejeebhoy
#47. And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in ...
Graham Swift
#48. What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?
Alanis Morissette
#49. History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
#50. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
#51. Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.
Medard Boss
#52. It is important to leave behind a rich and memorable legacy than just accumulated history!
Sanjai Velayudhan
#53. The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#54. History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.
John Smith
#55. The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.
Bruce Catton
#56. Peace will not wipe out the memory of the massacres it has committed ... And on this last day of the century, I promise Israel that it will see more suicide attacks, for we will write our history with blood,
Hassan Nasrallah
#57. Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?
Orhan Pamuk
#58. The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.
Giacomo Casanova
#59. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides.
Richard J. Evans
#60. There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come - a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years.
Christina Baker Kline
#61. There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
Karen Joy Fowler
#62. It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.
Omar Musa
#63. Author complains about the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.
George F. Will
#64. I feel, as never before, how justly, from the dawn of history to the present time, men have paid the homage of their gratitude and admiration to the memory of those who nobly sacrifice their lives, that their fellow-men may live in safety and in honor.
Edward Everett
#65. I am to die steeped in treasonous guilt, my name cursed, my memory unmourned and my service to The Kingdom blotted from history.
Paul W.S. Bowler
#66. You can't kill history. You can't shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that - if it's going to die, it has to die on its own
Leif Enger
#67. My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.
James Boswell
#68. In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
Wallace Stegner
#69. History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised.
The Confessions are Augustine's own first draft of history.
James O'Donnell
#70. . . . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time.
George MacDonald Fraser
#71. The early Christian historical memory was formed on three land masses -Asia, Africa and Europe. In this respect it does not differ
from textually recorded human history, which formed in the conjunction between these three great spaces. Only three, not seven.
Thomas C. Oden
#72. Scars are a reminder - a history or a memory stamped right onto your skin. I feel like I should have something stamped all over mine. On every single piece of me.
Beckie Stevenson
#73. History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
Theodore White
#74. We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.
Chris Hondros
#75. There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
#76. Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.
Martin Baker
#77. But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition.
Frederick Niecks
#78. For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.
Stant Litore
#79. Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.
Hilaire Belloc
#80. I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
Donna Tartt
#81. We know something of the history of the spread of Christianity, but much passed from recorded memory and much was transmitted by tradition whose accuracy has been repeatedly questioned.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
#83. Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
#84. The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
Michael Ondaatje
#85. Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
Toni Morrison
#87. It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?
Susanna Kearsley
#88. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
Elie Wiesel
#89. Memory is the most potent truth.
Show me history untouched by memories
and you show me lies.
Carlos Eire
#90. Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.
Howard Fast
#91. History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.
Peter Geye
#92. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.
Pat Conroy
#93. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
Ayelet Waldman
#94. This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.
Carrie Vaughn
#95. He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.
Tracy Kidder
#96. I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
#97. A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.
I.L. Peretz
#98. When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.
Steve Erickson
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