Robert A. Orsi > Quotes

“The claim "oh, that's ancient history" is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.”
― Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950

“Reference to the deadness of the past is a way of staking a claim on it. But historians must be open, as ethnographers try to be, to the shock of the unpredictability and difference of the past, which means open to the possibility of the past living in its insistence on telling its own story and so confounding us. Only in this way can the past teach us something new about ourselves, about the limits of our imaginings and ways of knowing, and even of our particular and distinctive ways of being human.”
― Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950