The secret history Quotes

“Here, in a few words, you’ve said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don’t talk. It’s remarkable. I’ve investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I’m the only person who knows that it’s the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.”

“An historian is a kind detective in search of the fact — remote or otherwise - that brings to a set of events apparently unconnected with each other, the link that unites them, their justification, their logic.You cannot imagine what great delights this profession affords. It’s as if, in every incunablum, consumed by worms and steeped in boredom, in every inarticulate scrawl, in every collection of forgotten chronicles, there presides a mischievous sprite, winking at you, who at the appropriate time confers on you your reward in the form of renewed wonder.”

“Asparagus is in season.”

“I never want to see umbrellas around me." he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.”

“Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.”

“The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.”

“All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.”

“But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

“It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.”