Kate Morton Quotes

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

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

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

If there's one country that can be trusted to understand the complexity of history, it's Israel.

When I was a kid, I loved history because history to me was a big story.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

History is what we would make of it.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, ... The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

History is the memory of a nation

You must have seen great changes since you were a young man," said Winston tentatively. The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents ... "The beer was better," he said finally. "And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course." "Which war was that?" said Winston. "It's all wars," said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "'Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

You change the past when you change the way you see it.

I was suddenly struck by how dissimilar we were. It occurred to me that if Grace and I were objects, she would be an elaborate digital clock, synced up with the World Clock in London with technical perfection, and I’d be a snow globe – shaken memories in a glass ball.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.