Today’s bloganuary prompt asks ‘what is your favourite quotes and why?‘ Not to be a broken record about this but that’s another prompt that has way more than one answer. I have a blog post with some of my favourite quotes called For The Love Of Quotes but to be honest I usually fall in love with a new quote every other week. I know Amazon is the worst but I love that you can link your kindle to your Goodreads and as you highlight they will attach the highlighted text to the book information. It’s a cool way of keeping hold of words that resonant.
A great quote from just this week is from The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi and it’s not actually a quote from the story but a note from the author:
“History is a myth shaped by the tongues of conquerors. What appears good may eventually sour and curdle in our collective minds. What appears bad may later bloom and brighten.”
Roshani Chokshi
I remember years ago, having a conversation with a friend and her saying that history is written by the conquerors and how that blew my mind. I mean once you give it any thought at all it makes sense but I’d literally never given it any thought, I’d just taken history as fact. I feel though, that my reason for thinking that might be to do with the importance Irish history had in schools when I was growing up. I mean we started learning about what the British did to us in Junior Infants. I remember learning to sing The Fields of Athenry at four years of age and after we learned to sing it the teacher went through it line by line and we learned about our colonisers. I think I thought from then on that history was like that, gave you the facts, no matter how ugly. That’s obviously not true and had Ireland still been under British rule I’m pretty certain a lot would have been left out of the classroom.
So yeah, this quote has been causing me to have a think about how we view history and those who wrote it this week.
mindforbooks.ie 