I Prefer Reading E-books On A High

Friends, Both The Imaginary Ones You Build For Yourself Out Of Phrases Taken From A Living Writer, Or Real Ones From College, And Relatives, Despite All The Waste Of Ceremony And Fakery And The Fact That Out Of An Hour Of Conversation You May Have Only Five Minutes In Which The Old Entente Reappears, Are The Only Real Means For Foreign Ideas To Enter Your Brain.

Each Decision - To Kill, To Sign A Petition, To Write A Letter, To Make A Speech, To Attack, To Lie, To Surrender - Was Made At Some Point In Somebody's Day.

One's Head Is Finite. You Pour More And More Things Into It - Surnames, Chronologies, Affiliations - And It Packs Them Away In Its Tunnels, And Eventually You Find That You Have A Book About Something That You Publish.

The Equivocations, The Confusions, The Contradictions. There's No Way We Can Live Through Or Comprehend Something So Big That Happened So Long Ago. We've Lost True History. But If We Are Willing To Tolerate The Contradictions, And If We Suffer Through Events Rather Than Ticking Them Off, We May At Least Get Closer To Understanding What Happened Than If We Grip The Handrail Of A Carefully Polished And Reassuringly Heroic Narrative.

History Isn't A Seesaw. If You Have A Really Bad Regime On One Side, The Actions On The Other Side Don't Automatically Become Good. It Doesn't Work That Way.