Jay Parini Quotes

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

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

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

History is what we would make of it.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

History is the memory of things said and done.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

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 the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

News is only the first rough draft of history.

History is an agreed-upon fiction.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.