The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon SchamaRead
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the resilience and rich narrative of the Jewish people throughout history.
In this quote, Simon Schama reflects on the extraordinary endurance of the Jewish people over thousands of years in the face of adversity. He emphasizes that not only have they survived monumental challenges, but they also possess a remarkable history filled with dramatic storytelling that contributes to their identity and cultural heritage.
Themes
JewsEnduranceHistoryStorytellingResilience
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech at a cultural event emphasizing the importance of heritage.
More from Simon Schama
All quotes βIn its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
Simon SchamaRead
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
Simon SchamaRead
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
Simon SchamaRead
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
Simon SchamaRead
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
Simon SchamaRead
Similar quotes
I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.
Bettany HughesRead
It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
Jared DiamondRead
It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states' rights or a way of life or a tradition - and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.
Richard CohenRead
History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'
Eduardo GaleanoRead
For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesRead
History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.
Rutger BregmanRead