Quotes about History

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

History (that list of ballooning wishes, flukes, bent times, plunges and mistakes clutched like parachutes) is rolling itself up in your head at one end unrolling at the other.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.

I remember a television program I once saw; a rerun, made years before. I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

Of course Crake wasn't Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n's instead of the usual spelling? "My dad liked music," was Crake's explanation, once Jimmy got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. "He named me after a dead pianist, some boy genius with two n's.

For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and — usually but not always — the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there.