History Quote by Julian Barnes

“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.” quote by Julian Barnes — Download Open image

““Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.””

Julian Barnes

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History Islands Past

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“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies of her splayed beneath me or arched above me. Daily intimacy made me proud of knowing about make-up, clothes policy, the feminine razor, and the mystery and consequences of a woman’s periods. I found myself envying…

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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

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“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.”

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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

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How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.…

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You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for…

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“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company…

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“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard…

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“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a…

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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

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“Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were…

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Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat…

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It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small…

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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records…

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In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will…

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The NBA is my history.

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History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago... The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the…

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We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what…

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What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

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Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot…

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History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of…

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We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.

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