Writing History Quotes

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“History, too, has a penchant for giving birth
to itself over and over again, and those whom it
appoints agents of change and progress
do not always accept their destinies willingly.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Let us guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft

“Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it--make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about history or some recent event.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator

“Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who are neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in the innate rate of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much. Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about us.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

“إن العلة في كتابة تاريخنا وتدريسه هي التركيز المفرط على أشخاص بذواتهم وأحداث بعينها . إن التاريخ رصد للملحمة الإنسانية الكبرى وهي ملحمة لها ألف وجه ويصب فيها ألف رافد وإختزالها في ما حدث للخلفاء والسلاطين أو ما حدث في المعارك العسكرية تسطيح قاتل”
― غازي عبد الرحمن القصيبي, باي باي لندن: ومقالات أخرى

“إننا لا نحتاج إلى إعادة كتابة التاريخ كما يقال لنا بين الحين والحين ولكننا بحاجة إلى إستكمال مالا يعد ولا يحصى من التفاصيل وتحليلها بطريقة منهجيه بدون النظر إلى التاريخ كمنظومة كاملة تشتمل السياسة والإقتصاد والاجتماع سوف نبقى أسرى المنهج التقليدي :"ثم جاءت السنة الفلانية وفيها مات فلان وإنتصر فلان”
― غازي عبد الرحمن القصيبي, باي باي لندن: ومقالات أخرى

“Writing history is like holding a conversation across the ages, responding to people long gone and posing questions to individuals yet born.”
― A.E. Samaan

“And again we confront the problem of history: it's usually the powerful who get to write it.”
― Heather McGhee, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“I'm not asking for secrets,' I told the detainees who thought I was working for the CIA. 'I'm not working for anyone. I'm working for me, for you, and for everyone to write the history of what happened to us here. We're going to leave here one day, and when we leave, I don't know if we'll ever see each other again to talk about these stories. If we don't capture them now, others might try to do it later without us. Why should other people write our history? We must write our history! So let us write it ourselves.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo