Colm Toibin Quotes

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

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

While we read history we make history.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

History is more or less bunk.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.