Unheard Stories Quotes

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

Dead men tell no tales.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.

I don't think even one per cent of the people in this world explore more than 10 per cent of all that this world has to offer. That's a shame!

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

I've had some interesting stuff happen to me - so why doesn't anyone ask me?

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.

Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen, or a conversation not held.

The kind of stories I like often comes from debutant directors.

I love to give voice to things that are not very visible.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

It's time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think - how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.

There is a lot you don't know about me - a lot. I have definitely lived, that's for sure. I will just leave it at that.