“She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.”

“It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her but they had been quietly excited... To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would have even been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of mighty human past was upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with fresh cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there.”

“History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised. The Confessions are Augustine’s own first draft of history.”

“[P]erhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”

“History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.”

“I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”