A Quote by Joseph Campbell
This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.
Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.
We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.
I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.
If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.
It's interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.
I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.
I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.
In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.
When you follow God's will for your life, you can see how yesterday's events prepared you for today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities.
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.
The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.
Historical chronology, human or geological, depends... upon comparable impersonal principles. If one scribes with a stylus on a plate of wet clay two marks, the second crossing the first, another person on examining these marks can tell unambiguously which was made first and which second, because the latter event irreversibly disturbs its predecessor. In virtue of the fact that most of the rocks of the earth contain imprints of a succession of such irreversible events, an unambiguous working out of the chronological sequence of these events becomes possible.
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