A Quote by David Olusoga
History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.
Related Quotes
It isnecessary to destroy the pretended nobility, entirely literaryand traditional, of marble and bronze? The sculptor can use twenty different materials, or even more, in a single work, provided that the plastic emotion requires it.
Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders.
For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.
I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.
I've always found that the best things I've ever written, or the things I like the most that I've written, are things where it's a pure idea, and you just follow it and put it down and see if it works.
I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.
It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.
A helluva athlete, the best ever to play his position in the history of the game.
It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.
Niches set back in the walls contained polished marble statues of entwined bodies. Will looked away from them hastily, and then back. It wasn't as if Magnus seemed to be paying attention to what Will was doing, and he'd honestly never imagined two people could get themselves into a position like that, much less make it look artistic.
The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
A lot of my work is about equalizing things and kind of destroying any barrier between what's high and low, or what's deep or what's shallow, complex or simple. I hope I'm ever-changing.
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
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