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Quotes on history (and fiction)
"I think that all of us who write about the past feel a deep and haunting connection with it. Socrates said that all knowledge is possessed by the soul and it's just a matter of remembering it. I believe that to be true." — Karen Essex
"History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt." —Guy Vanderhaeghe, as quoted in "A Good Guy," Quill & Quire, Sept. 2011
"The future is the past, returning through another gate." —from a poem by Victoria Chang
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." —William Faulkner
"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain
"In biographies you can make things up. In novels you are obliged to tell the truth." —Peter Ackroyd
"History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it." —Hilary Mantel
"The past is another country, another culture, with perceived realities very different to our own." —Mary Sharratt, in an interview
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