“History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.”

“In the business of scholarship, evidence is far more flexible than opinion. The prevailing view of the past is controlled not by evidence but by opinion.”

“Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.”

“...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.”

“We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present”

“But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share and no one else could view it anyway. The past is out ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.”