Joseph A. Amato > Quotes

“The family historian must master the art of storytelling. What, after all, is truth without anecdote, history without events, explanation without narration--or yet life itself without a story? Stories are not just the wells from which we drink most deeply but at the same time the golden threads that hold and bind--Ariadne's precious string that leads us through the labyrinth that connects living present and the living past.”
― Joseph A. Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

“Woven of fad and fancy, commerce and technology, war and revolution, freedom and necessity, our individual histories testify to the singular but crooked paths along which we traveled to the present.”
― Joseph A. Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

“And as much as history serves as a medium for discovering the past, it also is, we confess, a means to invent it.”
― Joseph A. Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

“My annual pilgrimages to the dead involve a good deal of talking to myself (which serves as my principal internal gyroscope) and increasingly confirm that the older I get the more the dead take hold of me. I like the notion that my heart is a temple of memory in which they intermittently reside. I feel compelled, in some way or other, to complete their lives, to honor their gifts and sacrifices.”
― Joseph A. Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History