#history

Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. ↗

— David Mitchell

#history #revolution #fantasy

it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?’ Strike thought of his own bizarre family history. ‘Probably,’ he said. ↗

— Robert Galbraith

#family #history #siblings #supermodel #family

What you don’t know going in is that when you come out, you will be scarred for life. Whether you were in for a week, a month, or a year—even if you come home without a scratch—you are never, ever going to be the same. When I went in, I was eighteen. I thought it was all glory and you win lots of medals. You think you’re going to be the guy. Then you find out the cost is very great. Especially when you don’t see the kids you were with when you went in. Living with it can be hell. It’s like the devil presides in you. I knew what I sighed up for, yes, and I would do it again. But the reality of war—words can’t begin to describe it. ↗

— William Guarnere

#memoir #military #world-war-ii #life

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners. ↗

— Alex Haley

#family

To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days. ↗

— Carol Ryrie Brink

#history #independence-day #past #family

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. ↗

— Erik Larson

#germany #history #hitler #war #world-war-ii

Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it. ↗

— Bruce H. Norton

#foce-recon #marines #military-history #vietnam #vietnam-war

...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory. ↗

— James D. Hornfischer

#combat #war #wwii-history #experience

Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better. ↗

— Irving Kirsch

#history #treatments #imagination

When I write to please everybody, it falls flat. When I write what I know, fearlessly, It won't please everybody, but it doesn't fall flat. ↗

— Ronald P. Chavez

#history #love #mystery #nature #sex