Jennifer Chiaverini Quotes

The history of a nation is not in Parliaments and battlefields but in what people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm and quarrel and go on pilgrimage.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

I write to learn the flow of history.

The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress.

I read more history books than anything else.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

I read a lot of history for fun.

I did like history. I was always quite interested and got good grades as well.

I am a great student and fan of history.

I like going back in time and writing historical fantasy. I use some real historical characters as a background to give depth to the fantasy. And I throw my fictional characters into the midst of this, and, so far, it has turned out interesting.

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

Political history is not the only way to approach historical figures.

I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.

I've always been fascinated by history.

I grew up loving history.

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.

I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

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

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

What I would give, I thought, to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective. From that moment, my interest in their remarkable friendship was captivated, and it never really waned.

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.