Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Clinton Van Doren

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

Marissa Moss

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

Thomas Mallon

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Tom Hulce

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Brian Eno

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Kara Walker

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

Brandon Boyd

Above our heads exists an infinity of unfathomable fantasiastics: and fields of future fireside fables trail close behind

Benjamin Franklin

Fiction or fable allures to instruction.

Beeban Kidron

Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

David Attenborough

Natural history is not about producing fables.

George Washington

Providence has done, and I am persuaded is disposed to do, a great deal for us; but we are not to forget the fable of Jupiter and the countryman.

Joseph Joubert

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

Petronius

One good turn deserves another.

Joseph Addison

Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it.

Northrop Frye

The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

Alan Titchmarsh

I love Paris for its wide boulevards and cafes, and Rome for the ancient history, as seen at the Forum.

Francis Wacziarg

The fact that it is set in a phantasmagorical island somewhere in ancient Sri Lanka throws up immense possibilities to explore this cultural hybrid, whether it's through costumes, sets or simply because of the Hindu environment that forms the spine of the story.

Sarah Monette

I would love with all my heart to be able to speak Greek, classical or modern or both. It is a beautiful language, both aurally and in terms of the intricacy of its construction. I took four semesters of Ancient Greek in college, but it's all rusted away now - and I never learned to speak it anyway.

Theodore William Richards

If our inconceivably ancient universe even had any beginning, the conditions determining that beginning must even now be engraved in the atomic weights.

Tim Birkhead

The human eye has long fascinated lovers, artists and physicians. The ancient Greeks dissected eyes, but struggled to understand how they worked, unclear as to whether they received or emanated light.

Eula Biss

There's something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.

John Pearson

We usually say of ancient persons, that they have already one foot in the grave, and the rest of their life is nothing else but the bringing of these feet together.

Marguerite Gardiner

The Temple of Diana is in the vicinity of the fountain, which has given rise to the conjecture that it originally constituted a portion of the ancient baths.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.