#tory

It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#achievements #career #clichés #double-standards #feminism

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends. ↗

— Fish

#story #writing #life

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense. ↗

— John Dufresne

#fiction #novel #story #storytelling #life

My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to? ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#life-and-living #life-story #loneliness #solitude #story

I'm a good storyteller. ↗

— Sophie Marceau

#i #storyteller

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#able #age #ask #believe #converse

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life. ↗

— Amy Tan

#mystery #life

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread. ↗

— Janet Wallach

#history #writers #life

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History. ↗

— Robert Penn Warren

#time #life

I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life. ↗

— Richard Fortey

#museums #natural-history #life