28 Quotes by Tony Horwitz

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

You know what I hate?' she said. 'When people say that history repeats itself. That's the scariest thing I can think of.

History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,' the English historian C.V. Wedgwood observed. 'We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term "recovered memory." Locals had reclaimed a past of their own , in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. "History, like nature, knows no jumps." Robert Penn Warren once wrote. "Except the jump backward,

John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.

I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.

I've been here in Richmond for six years and I still don't get it. To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we're dedicated to no hope, no future. It's like having a monument to unrequited love.

The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.

The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.