More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
you can infer past actions from current mental states.
we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined
we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It’s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.
Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?
