Fractured Retelling Of History Quotes

Jostling in the saddle against an iron shirt of mail wasn't half as romantic as the books made it out to be. ~ Amy Jarecki

She ... grabbed her bra, clasping it and shoving her arms through.
"Ye harness your udders?" The man was insufferable.
"For your information, it's a bra - short for brassiere, something that wasn't invented until the twentieth century. ~ Amy Jarecki

Barely able to breathe, Eva's tongue slipped across her lips.
He moved a bit closer. "Every time ye walk past, I want ye. Your scent sends my insides into a maelstrom of need."
She closed her eyes and drew out the moment, wishing he'd say that again. Oh, how delectable to listen to a medieval Scotsman declare his desire. ~ Amy Jarecki

Unbridled passion with an incredibly hot seven hundred-year-old Highlander in the middle of the night? Mm Yeah. Bring it on. ~ Amy Jarecki

Guard your throats and hide your eyes. He's not dead, you fools. Legends never die. ~ A.G. Howard

Ever since I was small, opera has been a living, breathing part of me.
The problem is that as I've grown, it's become more demanding… an entity that controls me. Once a song speaks to my subconscious, the notes become a toxin I have to release through my diaphragm, my vocal cords, my tongue. ~ A.G. Howard

Beyond any human lifetime, and often within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived - a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality. ~ Maria Popova

The history of Israel and Judaism is the unfolding of the meaning of this story. It's retelling is never finished and will not be until the Kingdom. ~ Timothy Radcliffe

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987) ~ Anatole Broyard

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day. ~ Bruce Feiler

The paradox of identity liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to think and act in a way that would actually accomplish the things it professes to want. It is mesmerized by symbols: achieving superficial diversity in organizations, retelling history to focus on marginal and often minuscule groups, concocting inoffensive euphemisms to describe social reality, protecting young ears and eyes already accustomed to slasher films from any disturbing encounter with alternative viewpoints. Identity liberalism has ceased being a political project and has morphed into an evangelical one. The difference is this: evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth…

If liberals hope ever to recapture America's imagination and become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of every background, actually share. And that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and to frame our appeals - including ones to benefit particular groups - in terms of principles that everyone can affirm. Ours must become a civic liberalism. ~ Mark Lilla

He raised his wine for a toast. "To the Exquisite Nightmare. ~ A.G. Howard

He appears close to my age. The left half of his face stands out beneath the hood: one side of plump lips, one squared angle of a chin. Two coppery-colored eyes look back at me – bright and metallic. The sight makes me do a double take. As far as he is from the car, I shouldn't be able to make out the color, yet they glimmer in the shadow of his cape, like pennies catching a flashlight's glare in a deep well. ~ A.G. Howard

I need to know why I'm so broken, so I can fix myself. One way or another. Maybe this place can help me do that, and then I can finally look forward to my future. Because I'm starting to realize there's something worse than stepping up and facing your fears – and that's living as if you're already dead. ~ A.G. Howard

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 ~ Anatole Broyard

In preparing for this ceremony," Kai said, setting the bouquet on the mantel behind him, "I did some research and learned that the word Alpha has held many meanings across history. Alpha can refer to the first of something," said Kai, "or the beginning of everything. It can be attributed to a particularly powerful or charismatic person, or it can signify the dominant leader in a pack of animals, most notably, of course, wolves." His serious expression tweaked briefly into a teasing smile. "It has meanings in chemistry, physics, and even astronomy, where it describes the brightest star in a constellation. But it seems clear that Ze'ev and Scarlet have created their own definition for the word, and their relationship has given this word a new meaning for all of us. Being an Alpha means that you'll stand against all adversity to be with your mate. It means accepting each other, both for your strengths and your flaws. It means forging your own path to happiness and to love. ~ Marissa Meyer

Paul's One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist's art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I'm happy to say that Paul's is in that first category. ~ Ashley Kahn

Astonishment: these women's military professions - medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper - and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles - here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history "humanizes" itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I've happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from the ground. Before her is the whole path - up and down - from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they "write" their life. Sometimes they also "write up" or "rewrite." Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people - nurses, cooks, laundresses - behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read - not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police. ~ Carl Joachim Friedrich

Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated? ~ David Mamet

Nothing capable of being memorized is history. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

One can argue that in the context of history a few years do not matter. But we live in an age in which every moment counts heavily and the price of delay is human lives. ~ Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

The Senkaku Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory based on international law as well as in the context of our history. ~ Shinzo Abe

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans. ~ Cameron Russell

Producing and distributing premium TV entertainment content is more 'global' now than at any point in the history of the business. World Screen does an excellent job in following the news, trends and key players. It's a must-read for those in the business of global TV and brings us that much closer to prospective buyers and distributors of our premium content. ~ Chris Albrecht

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life. ~ Scott Stossel

The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores. ~ Michio Kaku

This is the history of the world with perhaps a stronger dash of hypocrisy than usual to soothe our feelings. ~ Gregg Jones

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county's domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out. ~ Don DeLillo

But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy. ~ Bernhard Von Bulow

First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path. ~ Jim Cooper

Chuck Palahniuk
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and, except a short historical part, and a few sketches of history in the first two or three chapters, is one continued incoherent, bombastical rant, full of extravagant metaphor, without application, and destitute of meaning; a school-boy would scarcely have been excusable for writing such stuff; it is (at least in translation) that kind of composition and false taste that is properly called prose run mad. ~ Thomas Paine

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is n ~ Thomas Jefferson

A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one. ~ Donnie Yen

In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy. ~ Fareed Zakaria

When the facts of history are written Haile Selassie of Abyssinia will go down as a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin and left the millions of his countrymen to
struggle through a terrible war that he brought upon them because of his political ignorance and his racial disloyalty. ~ Marcus Garvey

I am the very first person in modern history who successfully deciphers the circular zodiac of Dendera. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

The fact was, as a story - even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean - the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we're in. The ~ Andrew Klavan

Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters. ~ Aurin Squire

Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor. ~ Sally Armstrong

We could easily have been abject strangers with no history of brief unsatisfying cinematic sex between us. ~ T.R. Pearson

Just like I am obsessed with the history of fashion, I love reading about the history of makeup. ~ Cyndi Lauper

Does that have to go in?" Lada asked.
"What do you mean?" Wistala said, brought back to the dictation.
"The battle. Betrayals. Incompetence, even cowardice. Boats falling, mud everywhere, blood running from balconies, carrion birds poking marrow from bones, dwarves hanging from bridges, burned corpses, but worst of all, no hero whose courage and skill is put to the ultimate test."
"They asked for a history, they shall have my history. If someone else will have the battle take place on a spring-green field with pennants at the lance points and songs sung over the honored dead, let them write it thus. This history is a story of death begetting death, and should end with carrion birds, for they are the only ones who come out the better at the end. ~ E.E. Knight

By the middle to the end of the 1970s, Black Power as we envisioned was a dream deferred. And I was no longer in a position to awaken the minds of the people about what was happening. ~ Junius Williams

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy.
... and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.
The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True, her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay patience, and strength, and hope, and faith,and joy. This last, modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and as Christians go in the present aeon of their history. ~ George MacDonald

History repeats itself only in that, from afar, we all seem to lead exactly the same life. We are all born; we all spend time here on earth; we all die. But up close, we have each walked down our own separate paths. We have stood at our own lonely crossroads. We have touched the lives of others at crucial points, for better or for worse. In the end, each of us has lived a unique life story, astounding and complicated, a story that could never be repeated. ~ Edward Bloor

We should consider the histories of Christ three manner of ways; first, as a history of acts or legends; second, as a gift or a present; thirdly, as an example, which we should believe and follow. ~ Martin Luther

It became the first company in the history of the world to offer cryogenics as part of its employee benefits package. ~ George Packer