38 Quotes by Thomas Cahill

Previous research has shown that every spring there are massive dust storms in Asia that transport soil eastward to Japan and across the Pacific to the United States. Now we've found that sulfate and organic aerosols are also present, and in roughly the same amounts.

I would like to restore, to the West, its genealogy, ... We have less and less history and it seems to me if you don't know where you came from you're an orphan and you don't know really who you are. You don't know your own name.

We think we know what history is. We think we know what happened and we don't.

Someone told me early on that whenever you get a question that you don't like, say, 'That reminds me ...' and go off on whatever you feel like, ... No one will ever bring you back.

Every one of these books is going to have one really big surprise in it to make people say, 'I didn't realize that,'

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't get through these books, .. If people don't finish your book, then they don't know what you're talking about.

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.