Top Ten Tuesday #317

Hi everyone! I hope you’ve been having a good week since I last did one of these. I had a really nice time with my friend last week, it was great to catch up and I also really enjoyed going riding, I haven’t been for a hack in ages, and the Scottish countryside is glorious. I’m back home now, getting stuff sorted for my new job.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday, courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic was Top Ten Book Quotes on whatever theme we chose, so I’ve decided to share my Top Ten History themed Book Quotes, as a great excuse to let out my inner History nerd. I wanted to make sure I only used quotes from books I’d read, but that idea kind of fizzled out towards the end, so there are couple on here from books I haven’t read. Anyway, here we go:

1. “History is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment you’re just…..living” -The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, VE Schwab

I read this one last year and this particular quote definitely resonated with me hugely because of the pandemic. Like I know we’ve all been living through something historically significant in the past year but it’s not something you necessarily think about in the day to day, mostly what I thought of during lockdown was how bored I was and how much I wanted it to be over!

2. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end…..everyone wants to be remembered.” -The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, VE Schwab

This is part of a longer quote, but I decided to just share this part because it was the bit that I found the most poignant.

3. “History isn’t about the dates and the places and the wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.” -The Storyteller, Jodi Picoult

This quote basically sums up why I fell in love with History in the first place and why I ended up studying it at University, there’s a common misconception that studying History is all about memorizing a lot of dates, and whilst there is that, it’s far more about learning about people’s stories from kings and queens, to everyday people doing extraordinary things.

4. “But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.” -The Mark of Athena, Rick Riordan

Surprisingly poignant for a Percy Jackson book! With everything that’s happened in the last year, Black Lives Matter making everyone think more about our colonial history, this quote is definitely something that’s taken on a new resonance for me.

5. “Nothing but a symbol? People die for symbols. People have hope because of symbols. They’re not just lines, they’re histories, cultures, traditions, given shape.” -The Gilded Wolves, Roshani Chokshi

The Gilded Wolves series talks a lot about history, particularly with regards to colonialism and the people left out by mainstream history so there were a lot of quotes to choose from but I picked this one because I thought it was a particularly powerful one.

6. “Depending on who you ask, sometimes ghost stories are all that is left of history. History is full of ghosts because it is full of myth. All of it is woven together depending on who survived to do the telling.” -The Silvered Serpents, Roshani Chokshi

Another beautifully poignant quote from The Gilded Wolves series, which again captures another of the reasons why I love history, it really is just an extension of my love of stories!

7. “History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth.” -Lair of Dreams, Libba Bray

This whole series explores a lot about history, looking at how crimes of the past have haunted people of the future and this quote really embodies that.

8. “Where I’m from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true….we call it history” -Wicked, Gregory Maguire

I’ll be honest, I’ve never read Wicked, I know this because it’s a line in the song Wonderful in the musical. It always makes me laugh though because it is true: not that everything in history is made up, more that we’re only ever presented with one person’s or one version of the “truth” and in actual fact there’s almost always a lot more to the story than the version we are presented with.

9. “The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on your fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it’s still there, the events and things that pushed you to where you are now.” -The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus isn’t one of my favourite books but I found this quote when I was looking for content for this week’s post and really loved it. The writing in this book is really lovely, it’s a shame the plot was kind of thin.

10. “Well behaved women seldom make history.” -Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Laurel Thatcher Urich

This is one of my favourite ever quotes and I had no idea it was from a book, or at least used in a book so it counted for this topic. It’s sometimes misquoted as “rarely make history” but I think this is the right one. Anyway, I just really love this one because it’s so true: my favourite women from history were definitely not well-behaved!

So there we go, some of my favourite history related book quotes! Have you read any of these books? Which one of these quotes is your favourite? What theme did you choose this week? Let me know in the comments!

Next week’s topic is a freebie, so I’m going to be doing Summery Book Covers to complete my Seasonal Book cover topics set!