A Quote by Nancy Horan

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

Nancy Horan

Quote Topics

Big Details Digging Fun Historians Historical Historical Research Keep Like Process Puzzle Research Secret Seductive Themselves Then Thrill Together Wildly

Quote Author

Nancy Horan
American - Author

I always loved digging away at the story, trying to find out things that people don't want you to find out and piecing it all together. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it, the thrill of the chase.

Kevin Macdonald

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

Gregory Maguire

To me, Alan Turing was a mystery - it was sort of like something I needed to unravel. And he was also obsessed with puzzles. So I wanted to make the movie like a mystery, like a puzzle that you're piecing together.

Morten Tyldum

Stop trying to figure it out. I love puzzles, but when I'm done putting together a puzzle, I feel accomplished, and then I wonder, "What's next?" Then I go start another puzzle. Life is a puzzle that I feel like we'll never fully put together. And I like that because, ultimately, I don't want to have life figured out and then wonder, "What's next?" That seems scary to me.

Josh McDermitt

Saw is like a big jigsaw puzzle. When you put a jigsaw puzzle together, you put the bottom left corner together first, and then you find yourself working on the upper right corner... Thats the way Saw plays out.

Tobin Bell

'Saw' is like a big jigsaw puzzle. When you put a jigsaw puzzle together, you put the bottom left corner together first, and then you find yourself working on the upper right corner... That's the way 'Saw' plays out.

Tobin Bell

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

No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.

Heinrich Schliemann

I love puzzles, but when I'm done putting together a puzzle, I feel accomplished, and then I wonder, "What's next?" Then I go start another puzzle.

Josh McDermitt

I'll work by myself for years and then I'll think it'll be fun to et one of my friends like Marshall Brickman or Doug McGrath into a room and not be alone for the writing of the thing; to have the pleasure of taking walks and get lunch together; its sort of a fun process and then I do it and then I get back on my own for a while until I feel the need to do it again.

Woody Allen

The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science skills. You learn all this in the most seductive way, and that is through learning about yourself. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? It doesn't seem like science or history, it's just fun.

Henry Louis Gates

You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you.

David Lynch

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

G. M. Trevelyan

The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.

Bob Shacochis

I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again.