Jeanette Winterson Quotes

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

Biography is the best history.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

A nation which has forgotten its past can have no future.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.