#story

He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’. However, little did I know at that time what revulsion the name Adolf Hitler would eventually invoke in the decent conscience of the world. ↗

— Alfred Nestor

#alfred-nestor #author-alfred-nestor #eva-anna-paula-hitler #eva-braun #hitler

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. ↗

— Stephen King

#on-writing #stories #storytelling #storytelling

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #empowerment #feminism #gender #history

Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#history #kings #presidents #revolution #president

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. ↗

— George Orwell

#propaganda #rewriting-history #understanding

All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#children #myth #story #truth #birth

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#jewish #mozart #race #racism #shakespeare

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#history #metahistory #politics #tradition #anarchism

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling. ↗

— Osamu Dazai

#japanese #storytelling #japan

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#positivity