“God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”
— Margaret Atwood, book The Handmaid's Tale
Historical Notes (p. 311)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
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Margaret Atwood348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
" A Dream of Fair Women http://home.att.net/%7ETennysonPoetry/dfw.htm", st. 2 (1832)
“I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist
"Personal Helicon", line 19, from Eleven Poems (1965).
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Source: Death of a Naturalist
Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 32
“David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.”
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist
"Hitler's Ghost" http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.html, Vanity Fair (June 1996) <br class="br">1990s
“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
John Wyndham book The Day of the Triffids
Source: The Day of the Triffids