Oral History Quotes

“Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability - a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, War's Unwomanly Face

“We met when we were only 16, at a high school dance. When he died, we were 50. I remember how I didn't want that day to end, terrible as it was. I didn't want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I shared with Sean. ~Beverly Eckert”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“How well do you know the people who raised you? Look around your dining room table. Look around at your loved ones, especially the elders. The grandparents and the aunts and uncles who used to give you shiny new quarters and unvarnished advice. How much do you really know about their lives. Perhaps you've heard that they served in a war, or lived for a time in a log cabin, or arrived in this country speaking little or no English. Maybe they survived the Holocaust or the Dust Bowl. How were they shaped by the Depression or the Cold War, or the stutter-step march towards integration in their own community? What were they like before they married or took on mortgages and assumed all the worries that attend the feeding, clothing, and education of their children? If you don't already know the answers, the people who raised you will most likely remain a mystery, unless you take the bold step and say: Tell me more about yourself.”
― Michele Norris

“My great-grandmama told my grandma the part she lived through that my grandma didn't live through and my grandma told my mama what they both didn't live through and my mama told me.”
― Gayl Jones, Corregidora

“Hanging out is good historical methodology.”
― Jean Pfaelzer

“She tells stories of working beside
her father, cleaning out fence rows
with his sling blade and hoe. Her stories
help me to see, as we work together,
that history is being made as it gets told.
Passed on as it passes by.”
― Eric Overby, Journey

“[My grandmother Mamie] used to say, 'Marion, if you don't feel right, if you don't feel good, just go outside. Take care of your flower bed and forget about everything else. If it's wintertime, go dig yourself a path in the snow whether you need it or not. You don't have to think too much to plant anything or scoop snow, and your mind can go back and figure out what's wrong.' I still take her advice to this day. (From Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould)”
― Amy Hill Hearth, Strong Medicine Speaks: A Native American Elder Has Her Say

“The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.”
― Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World

“In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.”
― Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

“Death is more just than anything else in the world: no one can escape it. The earth takes everyone- the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no justice on earth.”
― Zinaida Kovalenko

“Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legend recreates it in a manner which is only accidentally false and which allows it to go about the world, from mouth to mouth.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology

“A forgotten past is a past that is yet to be. A forgotten history is a memory missing from our collective conscience. An incomplete history is like an incomplete mind that has forgotten who it is and where it came from.”
― A.E. Samaan

“We arrive at 69th Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. ...

'Come inside,' she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. 'Come, you'll feel better.'

I shake my head no. 'Being Jewish can't help me anymore,' I tell her.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit.

With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness

“Today we say goodbye to a proud warrior. As we leave, each of us will take our members of [USS} Midway with us...you guys were the 'Magic.' It was a privilege to sail with you.”
― XO John Schork quoted in Midway Magic, An Oral History of America's Legendary Aircraft Carrier

“A forgotten past is a past that is yet to be.”
― A.E. Samaan

“The lives I have consumed are countless. The lives you can live within stories are endless. Through story, I gift you my sight. I let you see this world as I see it.”
― Whiti Hereaka, Kurangaituku

“Kevin Danaher: Our principle of unity was that we were going to nonviolently try to shut them [i.e. the World Trade Organization (WTO)] down. It wasn't asking for reform, it was abolition. We abolished slavery. We abolished prohibition on women voting. We abolished certain civil rights abuses. These institutions need to be abolished. They are bad institutions. But the protesting conduct has to be nonviolent.
[As quoted by DW Gibson.]”
― DW Gibson, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests

“The cities change. The bus line is different. The train runs on another track, but the scene is the same. Everyday in America, South Africa and other places in the world like them. Black people. My people. Travelin. To be cooks, janitors, housekeepers, porters, days workers, servants, Black boys, Beige girls, Brown daddies, Ebony mothers.”
― Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae

“If you speak to the right elders, you can find out anything. It’s like that in Atlanta, too. It’s like that wherever Black people are—we carry hidden histories, passed down from generation to generation.”
― Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer's sweetest reward.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts