All Quotes By Tag: History

“It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…”

“The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father’s dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)”

“A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit ’round the guttering sun.(“Ephemera”)”

“you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.”

“Gradually it became known that the new race had a definite purpose, and that purpose was to chart and possess the whole country, regardless of the rights of its earlier inhabitants. Still the old chiefs cautioned their people to be patient, for, said they, the land is vast, both races can live on it, each in their own way. Let us therefore befriend them and trust their friendship. While they reasoned thus, the temptations of graft and self-aggrandizement overtook some of the leaders.”

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”

“For when I trace back the years I have liv’d, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer’d Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.”

“We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.”

“If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being–ever mindful of its personal style.”

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

“This was long before the term ‘single-parent family’ came into use; back then it was a ‘broken home’…”

“As a breath on glass, -As witch-fires that burn,The gods and monsters pass,Are dust, and return.(“The Face of the Skies”)”

“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.”

“I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested–intrigued even–by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”