A Quote by Simon Schama
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.
Related Quotes
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.
Their pain [the injurer's pain at having injured you] and your pain create the point and counterpoint for the rhythm of reconciliation. When the beat of their pain is a response to the beat of yours, they have become truthful in their feelings...they have moved a step closer to a truthful reunion.
For my job, I act tough. I'm not tough. On the street, I don't go out beating people up and this and that. I used to joke one time on the television station that I never... Everybody that I beat up deserved it. I never beat up an innocent person.
Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.
A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.
We must be truthful and fair in the ordinary affairs of life before we can be truthful and fair in patriotism and religion.
This revolution began with young people in Syria demonstrating because they wanted a future. They wanted opportunity, education, and so forth. They went out and they did it. Thugs came out and beat them up. The parents got angry that the thugs beat the kids up, and they went out and demonstrated, and they were met with bullets. They were killed. That's how this began.
Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories.
I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.
In this post-modern culture in which we live - where people question absolute truth - stories are resistant to platitudes; they're resistant to me making declarations of truth to them. A story can do that in kind of a Trojan-horse fashion.
An argument is made that there are just too many question marks about the near future; wouldn't it be better to wait until things clear up a bit? You know the prose: "Maintain buying reserves until current uncertainties are resolved," etc. Before reaching for that crutch, face up to two unpleasant facts: The future is never clear and you pay a very high price for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.
'M Train' will take you in and out of dreamscapes and reality and remembrances with prose so spare and matter-of-fact that it delivers a much bigger emotional punch. Patti Smith doesn't need to embellish; she just tells her stories... and her stories are incredible.
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.
Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost.
I took my hand off the pause button. I had my life on pause. You get stuck, especially when you're drinking and isolating. I started homing in on what I wanted to do as a person. Just try to grow up.
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