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" I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected. "
Simon Schama
History
People
Think
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" The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. "
Simon Schama
Poetry
Life
Book
" Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a braised mushroom, other than a lot of braised mushrooms. "
Simon Schama
Mushrooms
Off
Nothing
" Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. "
Simon Schama
Live
Country
Different
" At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn. "
Simon Schama
Out
Ugly
Thought
" The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power. "
Simon Schama
Bible
Religion
Now
" It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present. "
Simon Schama
History
Past
Curiosity
" The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. "
Simon Schama
Moving
True
Bible
" I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory. "
Simon Schama
Identity
Community
American
" I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body. "
Simon Schama
Pin
America
Body
" America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words. "
Simon Schama
God
America
Great
" By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe. "
Simon Schama
Stereotype
Ugly
End
" It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium. "
Simon Schama
Think
Right
History
" The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too. "
Simon Schama
Early
Around
Late
" You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess. "
Simon Schama
Sleeping
You
Revolution
" The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story. "
Simon Schama
Bible
History
Nature
" A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin. "
Simon Schama
Memory
Human
History
" I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor. "
Simon Schama
Old
Inevitable
I Am
" From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. "
Simon Schama
You
History
Think
" I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor. "
Simon Schama
Write
Repair
Study
" We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. "
Simon Schama
Earth
Dead
Cheating
" The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication. "
Simon Schama
Extraordinary
Story
Jewish
" I am passionately invested in the survival of Israel and everything Israel represents. But I am extremely critical of much of its policy. I believe that the occupation must end. And if it doesn't, it will end Israel. I'm not in favor of settlements. "
Simon Schama
I Believe
End
Believe
" I was conscious of being wordy as a child. I was a terrible talker. I memorised the Latin names of flowers at five; I was shown off as a freak. My father encouraged me to be wordier than I was: he'd been a street orator at the time of Mosley, and his ideal primary concert speech was Henry V's speech before Harfleur. "
Simon Schama
Father
Speech
Flowers
" The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible. "
Simon Schama
Thought
World
Research
" Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing... I don't want to be part of a story where Jews are just victims or bullies - and I'm not saying that's what the Israelis are. "
Simon Schama
Saying
Music
Story
" The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church. "
Simon Schama
You
Church
Religion
" Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. "
Simon Schama
Light
Child
World
" I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me. "
Simon Schama
Sense
Me
Always
" My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God. "
Simon Schama
God
College
Mother
" The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me. "
Simon Schama
Want
Death
Golf