Narrative History Quotes

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Biography is the best history.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

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 never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Most of us get our history through story.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

Telling stories and having them received is so important. That dialogue is everything. I tell my students all the time that what separates us as human beings is our ability to hold stories. Our narrative history. There is so much power in that. Storytelling is our human industry.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.