‘... I dearly wished I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.’ (ISWM)
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... the past is a very big place... (ISWM)
'But now, apparently, we're in modern times.'
'That's what they say,' murmured Granny. 'Well, madam, I've never taken too much notice of them. Fifty years later they never seem so modern at all.' (CJ) Masklin realized he was standing at one of those points where History takes a deep breath and decides what to do next. (Wings)
... they lived peacefully and avoided having much to do with history, which tends to get people killed. (CP)
To history, choices are merely directions. (J)
What changed history were the smaller things. Often a few strokes of the pen would go the trick. (FC)
Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history … ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just … well, things happening one after another. (SG)
So much for time flowing past, he thought glumly. It might do that everywhere else, but not here. Here it just piles up, like snow. (P)
‘I declare the Stone Age at an end. History will start from tomorrow!’
And so it has been ever since. (DCC) When people talk about their great past they’re usually trying to excuse their mediocre present. (BOS)
It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you are going. And if you don't know where you are going, you're probably going wrong. (ISWM)
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past. (WS)
... he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter. It was heady stuff, except that brains weren’t involved. (Th)
... the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find. (S)
'It's wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that you’ve gone past. If you drive through a town, it’s still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn’t roll up behind you. Things aren’t over
just because they’re past. Do you see that?' (JD) History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren’t depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times. Or periods are named after kings, as if the country was defined by whichever stony-faced cut-throat had schemed and knifed his way to the top, and as if people would say, ‘Hooray, the reign of the House of Chichester – a time of deep division along religious lines and continuing conflict with Belgium – is now at an end and we can look forward to the time of the House of Luton, a period of expansion and the growth of learning!' (TG)
Around her, historians climbed library ladders, fumbled books onto their lecterns and generally rebuilt the image of the past to suit the eyesight of today. (TOT)
... it’s the view of the more thoughtful historians, particularly those who have spent time in the same bar as the theoretical physicists, that the entirety of human history can be considered as a sort of blooper reel. All those wars, all those famines caused by malign stupidity, all that determined, mindless repetition of the same old errors, are in the great cosmic scheme of things only equivalent to Mr Spock’s ears falling off. (LC)
Making history, it turned out, was quite easy. It was what got written down. It was as simple as that. (J)
'Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.' (J)
The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make an effort to catch them.
Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia. (LL) People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. (M)
History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always –eventually – manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time. (M)
'Actors,’ said Granny, witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.' (WS)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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