Shared History Quotes

“A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“There’s something beautiful about going through pictures from decades ago and saying, ‘Remember?’ You can’t do that with somebody new. There’s nothing to remember. There’s no shared history—only the brand new. I wanted to remember with someone. I wanted to remember all of it—the first kiss, the first time, the first child, the first graduation. But I never found someone to remember with.”
― Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, Vanishing Bodies: An Epic Science Fiction Thriller

“How can we live through this Shyam?” she asked in a small voice. How could their instant history be ballast against this? Or could some MacGyverism in their arsenal return them from where they were hurled? Her eyes still wet with tears, raked through his.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Does history give us any hope for this kind of pragmatic and pluralistic perspective? . . .Today, amid our latest addiction epidemics, we are faced with another precious and rare opportunity for synthesis, and I have hope that we can unite around an inclusive definition of recovery as being any kind of positive change. But in order to do so, we will need to turn to the pain of our shared past, because, as in the case of individual addictions, pain and purpose are so often intertwined, and our despair comes from somewhere. The suffering of addiction is not an individual malady—it also comes from deep, ancestral wounds. We need to face that fact too, in order to fully recover, together.”
― Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

“A family, it seemed, was as much a web of shared myths as of shared DNA.”
― Ben Blum, Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

“A community is a group of people whose connections and relations are formed by their shared history, traditions, experiences, geographies, and identities.”
― Michelle Good, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada

“In the tapestry of our love, every thread tells a story of devotion.”
― Rendi Ansyah, Beyond the Bouquet: A Symphony of Love in Fifty Movements