Jill Lepore Quotes

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

History consists of facts attested to by evidence.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

Most of us get our history through story.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

History is a never ending argument.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.