“I never thought that history would become one of my life's passions. I never even liked history when I was at school, apart from the context of literature, music, and art. But history has lately been revealed to me as the place where I live, where we all live, side by invisible side with others who - if we get quiet enough and listen carefully enough - will touch us and tell us their stories.”

“In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.”

“It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids.”

“History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.”

“I think literature reveals more about us than history does.”

“Doreen Fernandez' foreword to "Rizal Without the Overcoat":His essays remind us that history need not and should not be relegated to schoolbooks and classrooms, where it often becomes a set of names and dates to memorize and spew out on test papers. History is a living and lively account of what we were and are; it could and should be as real to each of us as stories about family or about recent and past events.. If all of that makes us understand humanity better, so does history make us understand ourselves, and our country infinitely better, in the context of our culture and our society.”