Personal History Quotes

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe

“Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“As it has the quality to transmit skills and knowledge, our personal history is a brilliant coach teaching us how to act and play along the meanders of life. While it inhabits our living it comes to be our fellow traveler shielding us from slippery slopes; and sometimes from ourselves. ("Going back to yesterday" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Names come and names go.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“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

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, War's Unwomanly Face

“Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were -- inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be.”
― Mark Mustian, The Gendarme

“When you know your history, you know your value. You know the price that has been paid for you to be here. You recognize what those who came before you built and sacrificed for you to inhabit the space in which you dwell.”
― Cicely Tyson, Just as I Am

“There is something in the room with us. It's familiar. It's a feeling I've known my whole life but never talked about. It's an invisible man or monster under the bed.
History. That's what it is. History is in the room with us. You absorb it even if it's not happening right in front of you. You absorb the feeling of it. It's there even though it's not there. It's in your skin.”
― A.S. King, Still Life with Tornado

“We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.”
― Penelope Lively, Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time

“She chuckled, and smiled, and realized that perhaps it was best not to share too much, at least not yet. Feeding slices of her life to her best friend over a long period of time could be the best way to keep him from choking.”
― Kaylin McFarren, High Flying

“In addition to time with family, you can experience true delight on the Sabbath from family history work. Searching for and finding family members who have preceded you on earth—those who did not have an opportunity to accept the gospel while here—can bring immense joy.”
― Russell M. Nelson, Accomplishing the Impossible: What God Does, What We Can Do

“We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents' relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.”
― Maureen F. McHugh

“What is my personal history if not the heroic narrative created by myself in an attempt to inform myself about who myself is, assisted by my tactically biased and fickle memory?”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Personal history is the self-image a man has acquired because of his view of the world - an image which he projects into the world around him.”
― Théun Mares, Cry of the Eagle: The Toltec Teachings Volume 2

“In order to erase his personal history the warrior must create around himself a fog in which nothing about him seems tangible. Only tangible people have personal history.”
― Théun Mares, Cry of the Eagle: The Toltec Teachings Volume 2

“Concepts such as age, place of birth and parentage can only have meaning within the context of personal history.”
― Théun Mares, Cry of the Eagle: The Toltec Teachings Volume 2

“Jane--it's history, all this."

I say that I have always thought history to be of great relevance.”
― Penelope Lively, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

“Heart Rings

What stories would our bones tell
if they had rings like trees?
circles marking the times
when you felt loved
when you were in love
when you grieved
when you did something that
required every last ounce of your courage
when you were full of faith —
That is how our hearts work
a lone, rhythmic documentarian
chronicling your life in the shadow of your flesh
mysterious even to its owner
And someday we might learn
that it was drawing a map
for the soul to navigate the real final frontier”
― Connor Judson Garrett, Become The Fool

“What is my personal history if not the heroic narrative created by myself in order to inform myself about who myself is, assisted by my tactically biased and fickle memory?”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Le aunce te nonc femante amna ce la corum morande corende (phonetically spelt) roughly translates to "The once his dark woman will become a new the Goddess." A black hooded cloaked figure spoke it to me around 1999-2000 when I was around 15-16 years old. It's also around the same time that I wrote several oddly cryptic poems while in a bit of a trance state. I'll share those as quotes here. I got the phrase translated in 2002 through my roommate's childhood best friend, Maggi.”
― Keisha Courville, Silent Monsters: The Ascension Series

“Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment
at having lost a library book.

Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting
to be found charming.

Me holding a rose though I want to put it down
so I can smoke.

Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me
because the explosion

of some dark star all the way back struck hard
at mother's mother's mother.”
― Brenda Shaughnessy

“What else to make
of the mind's slick confabulations?
What comes back
is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,
light filtered through water

closing over my head”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“I want to say good morning there to the happy boy I was
Happy child I was not
But distance is a brilliant blacksmith who can forge a moon from worthless scrap”
― Mahmoud Darwish, جدارية

“I walk these rooms
As if I could find the edges of my
Life. Not a memory that doesn't
Hold you in it. To name them all
Would take another thirty years.”
― Terry Blackhawk, The Light Between

“DM 357 began with a strange personal connection to history: three years before the tragedy, I had served aboard the very ship at the center of it.”
― Mehmet Fatih Öztürk