All Quotes By Tag: History

“This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.”

“Poor little girl. Poor little girl,” Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.”

“Is Dust immortal then, I ask’d him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.”

“history is what it is. it knows what it did.”

“Here dwell together still two men of noteWho never lived and so can never die:How very near they seem, yet how remoteThat age before the world went all awry.But still the game’s afoot for those with earsAttuned to catch the distant view-halloo:England is England yet, for all our fears–Only those things the heart believes are true.A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon this fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here, though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.”

“Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.”

“Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”

“I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.””Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?””How else? Though not till I’m done reading.”

“The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.”

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes… The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses… In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”

“My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”

“When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace.”

“What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”

“لا أعلم كيف أخذتني الأمواج وحملتني وطرحتني خارجها إلى يابسة لم تطأها قدماي من قبل. التصقتْ رمالُ الشاطئ بوجنتي الملامسة للأرض. كنت أقرب إلى البرزخ من الاستفاقة، وإلى الغيبوبة من الصحوة. أهلوس بأسماء غريبة، وأصرخ بصوت غير مسموع”

“An editorial in the Los Angeles Times [1923] wistfully asked, ‘Will eating chestnuts by crackling log fires become one of the lost arts preserved by a devoted people only in poetry and romance?”