A Quote by Michael Ondaatje
You are doing something over here and over there someone is telling you a joke, or giving you an important piece of information about sanitation, and no matter how weird the other subject is, there is a connection, or you can make a connection. I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
Related Quotes
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
The reason for teaching history is not that it changes society, but that it changes pupils; it changes what they see in the world, and how they see it.... To say someone has learnt history is to say something very wide ranging about the way in which he or she is likely to make sense of the world. History offers a way of seeing almost any substantive issue in human affairs, subject to certain procedures and standards, whatever feelings one may have.
By the end of the documentary [ '13th'], you really understand what prison is, what the prison industrial complex is, where this whole Black Lives Matter movement comes from, the history of resistance, the history of how politicians have used criminality over the decades for a particular political gain. It's to give people an understanding of it so they can make their own decisions about how they want to be in the world.
With all the movies I've made about history, it's not really fun because you're trying to get it right. You've got history telling how it was, and then my imagination is telling me how I wish it had been, but I can't go there, so I have to censor myself. I'm very good about stopping myself from creating history that never occurred, but it's frustrating.
Right now I am working on something that's pretty important to me. It has to do with my own history in politics. I'd done All the President's Men, and the history of how that came about is a story unto itself. It began with The Candidate. No one knows about that connection. I was on a train, and I was promoting The Candidate going from Jacksonville, Florida, down to Miami to duplicate what candidates in 1972 did.
I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.
Daddy loved our country, he loved our history. He was always talking about American history and telling us stories from American history, and loved our most treasured values of freedom, democracy, justice.
Collage is more than just an art style. Collage is all about bringing different elements together. Once you form a sensibility about connection, how different elements relate to each other, you deepen your understanding of yourself and others.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.
In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.
Throughout history we have seen the tyranny of the powerful over the less powerful - think of the history of colonialism or of slavery - and the tragic mistakes made when important information was not "heard" or valued.
Black History is enjoying the life of our ancestors who paved the way for every African-American. No matter what color you are, the history of Blacks affected everyone; that's why we should cherish and respect Black history. Black history changed America and is continuing to change and shape our country. Black history is about everyone coming together to better themselves and America. Black history is being comfortable in your own skin no matter what color you are. Black history makes me proud of where I came from and where I am going in life.
My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.
I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.
The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
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