A Quote by Penelope Lively

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Penelope Lively

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About Been Century Change Dictated Historian How Life Lives Our Our Lives Over Perceive Social Social Change Somebody Through Too Walked Wanting Whose Write

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Penelope Lively
English - Author
Born: March 17, 1933

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

Miguel de Cervantes

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

Shailer Mathews

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad

With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly -- through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes -- one of the great political dramas of our time.

Ronald Steel

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

Newt Gingrich

If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.

Greil Marcus

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

Christopher Hitchens

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Agatha Christie

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.

Amanda Foreman

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.

A. A. Gill

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

Ferdinand de Saussure

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

Alexis Ohanian

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

A. J. P. Taylor

When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian, and there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill -- whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains quite simply, a great man.

Geoffrey Elton

A Quote by Penelope Lively

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