Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

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

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is what we would make of it.

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

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

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

All history is contemporary history.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

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

Leave history to historians.

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.

Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

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