Kara Walker Quotes

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

History after all is the true poetry.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Leave history to historians.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

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

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.