Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

In these times when the practice of letters declines, no rather perishes in the cities of Gaul, there has been found no scholar trained in ordered composition to present in prose or verse a picture of things which have befallen.

History is merely gossip.

History: Gossip well told.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

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?

I love telling stories. I think of myself as a storyteller, and I don't feel bound by being just a singer or an actress. First, I'm a storyteller, and history is stories - the most compelling stories. There is a lot you can find out about yourself through knowing about history. I have always been attracted to things that are old. I have just always found such things interesting and compelling.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

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

I've long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths.

History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

I adored history, not the dry dates and boring battles, but the stories and the people who populated them.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.