Alice Sebold Quotes

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

I think all of the secrets of the universe are revealed in history. We understand who we are by understanding where we've been and why we are the way we are, and where we come from.

You never know when something's going to hit you in a particular way and just knock you loose.

You cannot not know history.

Repercussions are serious and they will take you places.

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

Everything that we experience every day leaves a long-lasting impression.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

History didn't begin yesterday.

I never want to make the kind of film whose impact ends when the audience leaves the cinema.

More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.

Ten thousand years from now our civilization will have passed without leaving a trace. A new race of people will inhabit the earth. They will come to Mount Rushmore and read the record we have made.

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.

Mere recording of an event will not make it a historical document. It will become obsolete with time. Only those that emotionally connect with the audience will stand the test of time.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

In time, perhaps, we will mark the memory of September 11th in stone and metal, something we can show children, as yet unborn, to help them understand what happened on this minute and on this day. But for those of us who lived through these events, the only marker we’ll ever need is the tick of a clock at the 46th minute of the eighth hour of the 11th day.

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.