Ali Smith Quotes

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

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.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy; reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

Most of us get our history through story.

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.

We're trying to let people see what their grandfather told them about.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

History is merely gossip.