“My thoughts swim. Back and forth, in and out, across the tides of history”

“It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.”

“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”

“History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape and adulthood were lurking, laughing, round the corner”

“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.”

“Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!”

“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”