David Guterson Quotes

If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

History is a table around which we can still sit and have a civil discourse.

Its roots are in American Negro culture, which is part of the whole country's heritage, but the dance speaks to everyone... Otherwise, it wouldn't work.

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.

My mum was born and raised in Ghana and has a lot of Ghanaian values and traditions and morals. All that rubbed off on me, and that's why I have a lot of love and good energy in me - that universal energy is a Ghanaian thing.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Family gatherings were very important to me growing up.

I think it's quite good to spend some family time.

I am a complete sucker for family time.

Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it - - not always, but sometimes - for constructive purposes.