My Commonplace Book

“History consists for the most part of a complex bundle of deeply interwoven threads, social, cultural and economic forces that are easily unraveled. The countless small, unpredictable and random events that flow on continually often have no long-range consequences. But some, those occurring at critical junctures or branch points, may change the pattern of history.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“History is the story of humanity, filtered by the intelligence of people who have the understanding. And history goes where it wants, Dionysius, like an enormous river that sometimes flows with unstoppable strength, overwhelming everything in its path, and that sometimes advances slowly in lazy spirals waiting to be subdued and controlled by the most mediocre of men. History is a mystery, a mix of passion, horror, hope, enthusiasm, misery. It is both fate and chance, as it is also the product of the iron will of men like you certainly. History is our desire to overcome our own unhappy existence; it is the only monument that will survive us. Even when our temples and our walls have crumbled into ruins, when our gods and our heroes are mere shadows, time-faded images, mutilated and corroded statues, history will remember what we’ve done. the record which survives us is the only immortality that we are granted.” – Valerio Massimo Manfredi, The Tyrant

“History is written by the victorious, the liars, the strongest, the most determined. Truth is found most often in the silence, in the quiet places.” – Kate Mosse, Labyrinth.

“There’s a peculiar dichotomy in the nature of almost anyone who calls himself a historian. Such scholars all piously assure us that they’re telling us the real truth about what really happened, but if you turn any competent historian over and look at his damp underside, you’ll find a storyteller, and you can believe me when I tell you that no storyteller’s ever going to tell a story without a few embellishments. Add to that the fact that we’ve all got assorted political and theological preconceptions that are going to color what we write, and you’ll begin to realize that no history of any event is entirely reliable. ” – David and Leigh Eddings, Belgarath the Sorcerer

“There is an ebb and flow in all human events, there is a building up and a tearing down, there are brief enchanted moments in history and in the short lives of men and women, there is wonder and there is cynicism, there are dreams that can come true, and dreams that can’t.” – Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast