Matthew

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Family historians are history's speed freaks. Other historians usually begin their stories from a point in the past, advancing gradually forward, covering a few decades, perhaps half a century at most... Family historians, by contrast, work backwards, accelerating wildly across the generations, cutting a swathe through time, like the Grim Reaper himself. In the course of an hour's research, surfing the Web at home or scanning the records in a local Family History Centre, they watch individuals die, marry and be born in series, a dizzying sequence of families falling away and rising up, eras going and coming, wars fizzling out and flaring, cities turning back to fields. The past looks like a hectic, crowded business.”
― Alison Light, Common People: The History of An English Family

“There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.”
― Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

“Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book