Randy Wayne White Quotes

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

My family, although they're very large on both my parents' sides, they don't know much about their family tree. Occasionally, they try to dig, but they can't get very far, and it's baffling. In Dublin, it seems that so many public records were wiped out; it's proven to be very difficult, so I know very little.

I've got tapes that I'm so thankful that my father made - old reel-to-reel tapes. I've got a ton of those things at home. He kept those like fine diamonds, I mean he kept them, you know, in a box and was very, very careful of them, you know.

I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who's living.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

I grew up in a wonderful blend of a lot of old culture.

I was thinking of my father's family. I can find their graves, but not that much about them. They didn't do anything notable enough to be in the records of newspapers.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within 'Roots' is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

I suppose I would like to find out more about my grandparents because I knew them when I was too young to grasp that they were interesting people. They were my grandparents, source of treats.

I look for subjects who have stories to tell - who are looking to tell something.

The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, marriages, and deaths, which most literate societies preserve in one form or another. In colonial America, surviving records of this kind - as of every other kind - are most abundant for New England.

The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them.

I've always been interested in listening to people's stories.

Our family is fortunate to have a well-documented history in a book titled 'The Flores Family - 1725 to 1963' by James F. Padgett.

Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.