Jeanette Winterson Quotes

History is everything that has ever happened.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

History is more interesting than most people think.

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

History is more interesting than politics.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

History didn't begin yesterday.

History takes time... History makes memory.

If we try to think back to the dim and distant past... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

My sense is that we are missing a huge part of the human story. I think it's possible, indeed probable, that we are a species with amnesia; that we've lost the record of our story going back thousands of years before so-called history began, and I think that if we could go back to that dark epoch, we would discover many astounding things about ourselves.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

If they [enlightened men] take any interest in examining, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of so many nations that have become extinct, they will doubtless take a similar interest in collecting, amidst the darkness which covers the infancy of the globe, the traces of those revolutions which took place anterior to the existence of all nations.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are - not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History .

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

Had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.