Isabel Allende Quotes

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Never, ever forget history.

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

It may not be art, but it is history.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

History takes time... History makes memory.

Things written, remain.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

I don't think you can erase history.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

History: a collection of epitaphs.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

What is not recorded is not remembered.

Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Write what should not be forgotten.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.