Lost History Quotes

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

My sense is that we are missing a huge part of the human story. I think it's possible, indeed probable, that we are a species with amnesia; that we've lost the record of our story going back thousands of years before so-called history began, and I think that if we could go back to that dark epoch, we would discover many astounding things about ourselves.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

I don't remember my childhood very well at all, but my earliest memory is holding a man's hand as I was walking down the street at about 1ВЅ. I can still remember the shoes I was wearing, but I don't know who the man was or what the memory relates to.

How long did it take for a past to die?

I've been working on the lost history of technical women.

In hunting ideas for books, I look for stories about long-past events that once commanded the world's attention but that, for one reason or another, faded from contemporary awareness.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall, and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all.