Quotation
Quote by Zhang Xuecheng
In the case of history what matters is its meaning; its medium is events, and its vehicle is literature.
Explore the idea
Understanding this quote
This says that history is not only a record of events. Its deeper importance lies in the meaning people draw from those events. Events provide the material, while literature carries and presents that meaning in words. The quote therefore separates what history contains from how its significance is communicated.
Source & trust
About this quotation
- Source
- JSTOR / Stanford University Press, On Ethics and History: Essays and Letters of Zhang Xuecheng
- Format
- Official Statement
Explore the idea
Topics
Join the community
Keep meaningful words close.
Save quotes, follow people and topics, join conversations, and publish words of your own.
Conversation
0 comments
No comments yet.
Start the conversation about this quote.
“When I released diss tracks, I didn’t do that for fame, but to tell my part of the story.”
“What I wanted in coming to Belleville is to spend less time behind the typewriter and more time on my boat.”
“The most important questions that should be asked with regard to the life and mission of the Church today are not related to the relevance but to the content of the gospel.”
Read quote“I was writing code entirely by hand on pieces of paper.”
“A language is much more profound than that.”
“Really, what I like doing is telling stories. All I really try to do is tell the story as simply and directly as I possibly can.”
““It’s the writer’s job to tell society what it pretends it doesn’t know.””
“This, and whatsoever I myself observed, after attaining years of discretion, for thirty or forty years, I laid up in the strong box (of my memory), and that I have written.”
“Writing is a renaming of the world.”
“Cuando la película tiene un mensaje, cuando tiene corazón o te hace sentir algo, te la llevas contigo y la amas mucho más que si solo fuera risas.”
A Box, Then a Door
Seventeen-year-old Elia expects a tidy catalog, but a box of undelivered letters leads her into the living memory of a harbor town—and toward a new way of helping people speak.
Read Story