Sally Watson Quotes

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.

Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

What man is, only his history tells.

I think that the best movies are made, not from a point of view that depends on your personal history, whether it's the color of your skin or the politics that you had or the place that you come from, but from a point of view of an understanding of human nature, an understanding of history, and an understanding of what motivates people.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Anne Romaine [ is ]folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field [of Malcolm X].

History isn't through with me yet.

My past is my shadow, it follows me everywhere I go. Well, all those things come from when I had no other choice. They put my back against the wall. I do what I gotta do.

In a small cathedral town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on.

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.

As you go down the rabbit hole of reading into our history, you realize that there are so many things that history books didn't teach us about ourselves.

The truth is that everybody has a past and everybody has an ex.

To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Biography is the best form of history.

There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold.

Well, everybody has a history.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

Seventy-five years ago I was born in Tampico, Illinois, in a little flat above the bank building. We didn't have any other contact with the bank than that.

This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.