We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them.
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn’t fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.
If there is an abiding theme in ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’ it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people’s past histories.
A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they’re dragging behind them.
I’m trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there’s an echo to a much larger reality.
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
I find diplomatic histories the dullest of histories.
Each moment is defined by a multitude of histories, the past constantly converging upon us, perpetually decaying and reforming itself on the steady pulse of now, now, now, now.
The idea that all we have is everything that’s come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, ‘Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?’
A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties.
As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data’ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.
The great untruth around which everything pivots is the idea that the defenders of these statues are the defenders of history and truth; while those who want to see them toppled or contextualised are the Huns at the gate, who would destroy national histories and bring down great men.
Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.
In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don’t like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.
I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
The history of Germany is not the history of a nation, but of a race. It has little unity, therefore; it is complicated, broken, and attached on all sides to the histories of other countries.
I got caught back up in the underworld because the upperworld really doesn’t have a place for people with criminal histories.
I invented the psychological histories and the relationship between Jack and Susan Stanton. I didn’t know anything about the Clintons. I don’t know more about the Clintons’ marriage than you do.
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people – writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics – who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.
I love traveling and seeing new things, learning the histories of different cultures. But I’ve always wanted to go to the Galapagos to see the giant turtles.
I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won’t break.
There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
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