Alive Quote by Simon Schama

“It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.”

Simon Schama

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More by Simon Schama

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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The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a…

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Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been…

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Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny…

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In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

Simon Schama

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Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -…

Simon Schama

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Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they…

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In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not…

Simon Schama

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From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that…

Simon Schama

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The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

Simon Schama

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The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial…

Simon Schama

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At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I…

Simon Schama

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I feel very grateful to be alive and well enough to make music.

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I don't crave applause. I'm not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I'm much more alive at home, I think.

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We must master our egoism, and through this mastery, step outside ourselves and educate ourselves in giving. Fasting requires that we rediscover all that…

Tariq Ramadan