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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
– Julian Barnes

Related Quotes:

  1. The Djojobojo Prophecy doesn’t just tell you WHAT happened and WHERE it happened…it tells you WHY it happened! – Yvonne B Murtha
  2. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen. – Julian Barnes
  3. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. – Julian Barnes
  4. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. – Julian Barnes
  5. History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. – Julian Barnes
  6. The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. – Julian Barnes
  7. It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit. – Larry Kramer
  8. History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other. – Philip Guedalla
  9. Dr. Suess said: ‘Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened..’ I tell my dates: ‘Don’t cry because it happened, smile because it’s over – Josh Stern
  10. And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. – Julian Barnes
  11. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? – Julian Barnes
  12. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. – Julian Barnes
  13. Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance. – Julian Barnes
  14. Pride makes us long for a solution to things -“ a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. – Julian Barnes
  15. Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be. – Julian Barnes
  16. The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else. – Julian Barnes
  17. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty. – Julian Barnes
  18. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a ????ing mess. – Julian Barnes
  19. Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex. – Julian Barnes
  20. you find yourself repeating, -˜They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. – Julian Barnes
  21. Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks. – Julian Barnes
  22. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. – Julian Barnes
  23. Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away. – Julian Barnes
  24. The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? – Julian Barnes
  25. He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. – Julian Barnes
  26. …I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. – Julian Barnes
  27. But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. – Julian Barnes
  28. wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment. – Julian Barnes
  29. Opera cuts to the chase-”as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. – Julian Barnes
  30. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. – Julian Barnes
  31. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. – Julian Barnes
  32. But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book. – Julian Barnes
  33. Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke. – Julian Barnes
  34. Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young. – Julian Barnes
  35. ..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. – Julian Barnes
  36. … forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. – Julian Barnes
  37. I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas. – Julian Barnes
  38. If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul. – Julian Barnes
  39. Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity. – Julian Barnes
  40. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. – Julian Barnes

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