A Quote by Margaret Atwood

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

Margaret Atwood

Quote Topics

Darkness Echoes Filled Great Historians Know Past

Quote Author

Margaret Atwood
Canadian - Novelist
Born: November 18, 1939

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

Margaret Atwood

In a world filled with misery and uncertainty, it is a great comfort to know that, in the end, there is light in the darkness.

Joshua

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Frank Herbert

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

The darkness, of which the historians complain, is essentially the darkness of their own ignorance.

George Sarton

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

Michelle Dean

Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition

Victor Hugo

I'm just tired of everything…even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes…echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They're beautiful and mocking.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

Daniel J. Boorstin

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

Peter Greenaway

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Eric Hobsbawm

My heart beats, echoes into the cold streets where nightmares and darkness begin to meet.

Tyga

The thing is with these members, especially Omar and Tlaib, honestly, I feel like their hearts are filled with darkness. AOC's heart might be filled more with cotton candy and unicorns.

Lee Zeldin

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.