Personal Histories Quotes

Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

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.

Our kids will never have to remember things, because it's all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There'll be video of it on your phone.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

Every person I see has a story to tell.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside? At the library I couldn’t help but notice which patrons checked out the same books. They appeared to have nothing in common, but who could tell what a person was truly made of? The unknown, the riddle, the deepest truth. I noticed them all: the ones who’d lost their way, the ones who’d lived their lives in ashes, the ones who had to prove themselves, the ones who, like me, had lost the ability to feel.

I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know, 'I was born in Acton, and I went to such and such a school.' They just bore me.

The Memorial Finder covers the gap. It tells you the specific panel and number where you can find an individual but begins to reveal the connections between the names themselves. As you move around the site itself, a smartphone app will reveal adjacencies as well as the stories behind the names.

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I kept a diary - actually, quite a number of them over the years.

I glance into the faces of all these people out for a Sunday stroll, but I'm not seeing eyes and noses and mouths. I'm seeing stories. Every person has a story. All the hopes and dreams. And fears. And secrets. In every face.

When you get into the series, the progression is much different. You actually have breathing room and the chance to sit down with each actor, which was a part of our process, to talk to them about their pasts.

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.

Each day has a story to - deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

The saying goes that history repeats itself; personal histories do the same. We can gather the lessons of others' lives through observation, conversation, and by seeking advice. We can use the automatic system to find out who the happy people are, and the reflective system to evaluate how they got to be that way. Pursuing happiness need not be a lonely endeavor. In fact, throwing in our lot with others may be a very good way of coping with the disappointments of choice.

There is no such thing as a person that nothing has happened to, and each person's story is as different as his fingertips.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

I grew up reading biographies on groups, and I love all that. The thing about biographies, it's the old cliché but it's true - a lot of the time these things are more about the author than they are about the group.

'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons' is a kind of novel in verse about the arc of an urban lesbian love affair - and I suppose there is a certain amount of voyeurism in the consumption of fiction! The 'Sancerre' poems here are more contemplative and about the relationship of the individual to local and wider histories.

You'll find a lot of rich detail in people's personal histories - diaries and journals and things of the era.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.