Traditions History Quotes

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you. ~ Kingsley Amis

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest. ~ Diriye Osman

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me. ~ Anne Carson

I don't think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history, it's a prejudice based on simple fact. ~ Caitlin Moran

Where I come from, there were traditions with my race and whenever you faced a curve in life, there was always a tradition. ~ Chaske Spencer

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are. ~ Ken Burns

It's only when it's smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it - this incredibly complicated period when everyone's doing something different every day - that we look for those stylistic similarities and we say, "Well, that's what that was about," and sort of forget all the other nuance. I definitely feel that that's true for this time in my community of artists, and I'm sure that it was true at other times too. ~ Missy Mazzoli

I threw away the whole of my working history, my photograph albums, diaries and stage clothes. Shoving big, ugly discs on walls is a bit like rubbing people's faces in it, saying 'I am considerably richer than you.' It is completely unnecessary. ~ Alison Moyet

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious. ~ Rebecca West

It's a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you've mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You've done your research, gathering the facts; historical, social, climatic culinary, that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with color, contrast and telling detail.
Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing.
In spite the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been pestering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: IT WON'T WORK.
An element is missing, that spark that brings to life in a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right.
Your story is emotionally dead, that's the crux of it.
The discovery is something soul-destroying, I tell you. It leaves you with an aching hunger. ~ Yann Martel

Jane Austen's world is a unique wedge of history, immortalized by her wonderful books. It is ironic that I am fascinated by the Regency world in all its details, when Jane Austen seldom mentions any of those facts. She never mentions the war raging in Europe, her characters are apparently unaware of the industrialization shortly to overtake them. The revolution of steam travel does not touch her people–they travel by coach, horse, and foot." and "There is no doubt that Austen herself was aware of the world around her and its imminent change. But her characters live in the world of the family, the village and the heart–and are loved because of it. The trappings of the greater world do not impinge on Jane Austen's books. ~ Lesley-Anne McLeod

Read good writing, and don't live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it's not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. ~ Rebecca Solnit

My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ. ~ Reza Aslan

We were happy a hundred years ago. We knew that there were exploiters and exploited, wealthy and poor, and we had a perfect idea of how to get rid of injustice; we would expropriate the owners and turn the wealth over to the common good. We expropriated the owners and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history. And we keep repeating that in principle everything was all right, only some unfortunate accidents slipped in and slightly spoiled the good idea. Now let us start afresh ... ~ Leszek Kolakowski

Today - wealthier, more powerful and more able than ever before in our history - our Nation can declare another essential freedom. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe. ~ Marie Brennan

If you know from history the danger, then part of the danger is over because it may not take you by surprise as it did your ancestors. ~ Simon Wiesenthal

Life is terrifying. None of us have rule book. None of us know what we're doing here. So, the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe you're at the top. And if you're at the top, then people who aren't like you … well, they've got to be somewhere lower, right? Every species does this. Does it again and again and again. Doesn't matter if they do it to themselves, or another species, or someone they created.' She jutted her chin toward Tak. 'You studied history. You know this. Everybody's history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we've done to each other. ~ Becky Chambers

So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.
Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now. ~ J.P. Delaney

The history of Protestantism is very great. It presents like no other of Luther's writings the central thought of Christianity, the justification of the sinner for the sake of Christ's merits alone. ~ Martin Luther

Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision ~ Harry Crews

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause. ~ Umberto Eco

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history. ~ Russell Lynes

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists ... to understand how those evil things came about. ~ Jared Diamond

We must repudiate the settling of native artisans in some wilderness,[13] for this is the day to call for the greatest synthesis of the century: To incorporate into a single trumpet blast the voices of the dead centuries, to give regency to the scientific chorus of modernity, to bring to life the developments affected by our generation, to instill in them a demonic fire, and to thaw-out the frozen engine of history. ~ Anonymous

I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.
As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.
> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67 ~ Milton Friedman

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world. ~ Michel-Rolph Trouillot

I sang 'American Pie' a lot in my stage set. It had a knack of uniting an audience in a sing-along. It's a clever song about American history but wrapped in a fantastic tune. ~ Johnny Vegas

Aomame imagined the carefree winds sweeping across the plains of Bohemia and thought about the vicissitudes of history. ~ Haruki Murakami

The enemy must fight his battles far from home for a long time...We must weaken him by drawing him into protracted campaigns. Once his initial dash is broken, it will be easier to destroy him...When the enemy is away from home for a long time and produces no victories and families learn of their dead, then the enemy population at home becomes dissatisfied and considers it a Mandate from Heaven that the armies be recalled. Time is always in our favor. Our climate, mountains, and jungles discourage the enemy; but for us they offer sanctuary and a place from which to attack. ~ Tran Hung Dao