“When I think about history – what I’ve learned, how I’ve learned, when in my life I’ve been ready to learn – it’s always connected to music.” – pg. 9
“Most important, don’t let this be your last book. Get a stack going on the table next to your bed, and another stack going on the counter in your kitchen. Always have something within arm’s reach that makes you consider and reconsider, agree and disagree, follow someone else’s train of thought and then switch it onto your own track.” – pg. 14
“The farther away an event gets, the more we can potentially know about it – the more we’ve been able to read about it, think about it, process various theories about it.” – pg. 19
“You can tell something’s missing when you see people trying to find it.” – pg. 42
“Fiction can sometimes be true.” – pg. 92
“We’re reductive so that we can be constructive. […] Extremely complicated situations are simplified so they can be communicated to others.” – pg. 99
“History should matter to all of us at all times, because we’re all in it.” – pg. 123
“Should you shut your eyes to the most painful parts? Should you narrow your gaze only to what concerns you and those close to you? Or should you open your eyes wide, take it all in, and then seek out pleasure, comfort, and joy despite what you have just taken in? Should you decide things don’t matter or should you practice mind over matter? Prince counsels the latter: […] If I gotta die, I’m gonna listen.” – pg. 139
“I was also, for the first time, an adult. A young one, certainly, but a person with a vision of what kind of world I might want to live in and what I thought it might be able to give me (and, less important at first, what I might be able to give it.)” – pg. 210
“When you find yourself at the crossroads of history, look in all directions.” – pg. 237
“I had come in ready to make history by remaking History, but I had run into an event.” – pg. 311
“The majority of people live only for the past.” – pg. 319
“No matter how small the scale, no matter how fine the grain, there’s simply no way to recover the past in all its richness and contradiction.” – pg. 320
“That’s the excitement of it, or the terror. It’s like walking into a room without any real sense of what’s in there. Later they’ll come and take pictures of the room, and they’ll figure out what happened here. But I gotta go.” – pg. 321
siftyproductions.com 