Histories Quotes

“Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Today wouldn't have happened if histories weren't falsified.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“The anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment—” “She goes back in time,” G. G. Ashwood said. Joe stared at him. “Back in time,” G.G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip’s kitchen. “The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision after he’s made it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Histories don't make men; men make histories.”
― Ogwo David Emenike

“How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shard human (and indeed also most divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us absolutely from animals but, more significant, the imbrications of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shred and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but can we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words, afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves living — and having lived — in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces?”
― Satya P. Mohanty

“When no one is left to tell what happened, family histories keep their secrets.”
― Carmen Posadas, Little Indiscretions

“Today carries two life histories; the written one as Yesterday and the unwritten as Tomorrow; both travel continuously.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.”
― Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven