A Quote by Sarah Churchwell

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Sarah Churchwell

Quote Topics

Blurred Drunken End Guest History Like List Memory Party Starts Tendency

Quote Author

Sarah Churchwell
American - Educator
Born: 1970

Our profession is very much like going to a cocktail party, you check out the guest list.

Robert Stack

A balanced guest list of mixed elements is to a successful party what the seasoning is to a culinary triumph.

Letitia Baldrige

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.

Rita Mae Brown

I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.

Floyd Skloot

History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares.

Sarah Churchwell

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Joyce Carol Oates

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

Hilma Wolitzer

Whenever someone makes out a guest list, the people not on it become officially uninvited, and that makes them the enemies of the invited. Guest lists are just a way of choosing sides.

E. L. Konigsburg

I remember playing six nights at Wembley in the 80s. I partied for three of those straight, with our friends Duran Duran. Back then, the fun was about the after-show - who was coming to the party and whether they had a guest list pass.

Martin Kemp

Every great summer party starts with a list. Throwing something together chaotically ends up being more work than taking 15 minutes to make a plan first.

Katie Lee

The Tea Party thing is only apt in some ways. The activism in the town halls, that looks superficially like it. But what the Tea Party did was, they went after the party, the Republican Party, as their vehicle. And parties is how you change history.

Mark Shields

The worst effect of party is its tendency to generate narrow, false, and illiberal prejudices, by teaching the adherents of one party to regard those that belong to an opposing party as unworthy of confidence.

Dorothea Brande

There's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 1 and 2, and Ratatouille. It's super surreal. We've been working on this for eight years nonstop. Every week we've had a Sausage Party meeting, and now it won't be on our to-do list anymore. It's like the end of summer camp.

Evan Goldberg

There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.