Time Travel in Novels and Short Stories
Time travel is a recurrent theme in science fiction literature. Thousands of books incorporate time travel. Below are examples of texts that are repeatedly recognized as works of science fiction (as the genre has been defined in this article) that integrate time travel.
| Date | Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1733 | Memoirs of the Twentieth Century | Samuel Madden | A guardian angel travels to 1728 with letters from 1997 and '98 |
| 1838 | Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism | Anonymous Dublin University Magazine | Traveler picked up by a stagecoach but is suddenly transported back over a thousand years. |
| 1843 | A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | Ghosts accompanies Scrooge into the past to show his life, then the future to show the consequences of his heartlessness if he does not change his ways. |
| 1861 | Paris Before Men | Pierre Boitard | Magic of a “lame demon” allows main character to interact with prehistoric life. |
| 1881 | The Clock That Went Backward | Edward Page Mitchell | A clock that has the power to take people back in time. |
| 1887 | El Anacronopete | Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau | First to introduce a time machine, originally written as a zarzuela in 1881, released as a novel in 1887. |
| 1887 | Looking Backward: 2000-1887 | Edward Bellamy | Julian West towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. |
| 1888 | A Dream of John Ball | William Morris | Describes a time travel encounter between the medieval and modern worlds. |
| 1888 | "The Chronic Argonauts" | H.G. Wells | Inventor takes another with him in a time machine, before deciding to leave to a time where he will fit in more. |
| 1889 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain | 19th century citizen goes to King Arthur's time (528 AD). |
| 1891 | Tourmalin's Time Cheques | Thomas A. Gutherie | Time travel and the paradoxes that can result from it. |
| 1895 | The Time Machine | H.G. Wells | Inventor creates a time machine and travels to the year 802,701 A.D., where he finds humanity have evolved into two races, Morlocks and Eloi. |
| 1919 | Enoch Soames | Max Beerbohm | Enoch is transported 100 years into the future (1997) to see if he became a great writer or not – a Faustian-like pact with the Devil is involved. |
| 1928/ 1929 |
Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Philip Francis Nowlan | Anthony Rogers is transported to the year 2419 by a strange cave gas. Later became the comic strip Buck Rogers. |
| 1936 | Burnt Norton | T. S. Eliot | Begins with "Time present and time past// Are both perhaps present in time future..." |
| 1939 | A Traveller in Time | Alison Uttley | Child goes back into Derbyshire of the Babbington Plot and Mary Queen Of Scots. |
| 1941 | By His Bootstraps | Robert A. Heinlein | Circular paradox-character is brought to the future where he later operates a time machine to bring himself to the future |
| 1942 | All-Star Comics #10 | Justice Society of America use a time ray to travel 500 years into the future and get an effective bombing defence to protect America. | |
| 1946 | Vintage Season | "Lawrence O'Donnell" (joint pseudonym of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner | Time travellers from the future experience wonderful seasons and spectacular events in the past. |
| 1947 | All-Star Comics #35 | Villain Per Degaton murders a scientist who has invented a time machine and tries to use it to change history, causing modern technology from the Present, meaning he can then conquer America with technology protected from thee effects. | |
| 1952 | "A Sound of Thunder" | Ray Bradbury | Changes in the past affect the future; part of the genealogy of the term Butterfly effect |
| 1953 | Bring the Jubilee | Ward Moore | A time traveller from an alternate reality appears at the Battle of Gettysburg and alters his own future into ours. |
| 1954 | Experiment | Fredric Brown | An experiment involving the time travel of a small brass cube results in disaster. |
| 1955 | The End of Eternity | Isaac Asimov | Use time machines to transfer goods between centuries |
| 1955 | "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" | William Tenn | Historian returns to mid-20th century to study artist whose works he finds himself having to create, so the past is a product of the future's interest in the past. |
| 1955– 1995 |
Time Patrol, plus 10 others | Poul Anderson | Series of 11 novels related to the Time Patrol, an organization which protects the past. |
| 1956 | Extempore | Damon Knight | Man learns how to travel through time. |
| 1956 | Pawley's Peepholes | John Wyndham | Time travellers from the future disrupt life in a small town life by treating it as a quaint place for sightseeing. |
| 1956 | The Stars My Destination | Alfred Bester | In a future in which self-teleportation is common, Gully Foyle discovers how to teleport himself through time as well. |
| 1957 | Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd (A Week in the Wales of the Future) | Islwyn Ffowc Elis | A novel in the Welsh Language, in which the narrator travels to Wales on two occasions in the year 2033 and encounters contrasting future scenarios each time. |
| 1957 | The Door Into Summer | Robert A. Heinlein | After thirty years trapped in suspended animation, a man uses a time machine to go back and exact revenge on his friend and fiancée for stealing his business. |
| 1957 | The Last Word | Damon Knight | Tale of Armageddon and the Devil. |
| 1957 | Soldier From Tomorrow | Harlan Ellison | A soldier comes back from the future to warn against the path toward global conflict. |
| 1957 | Double Indemnity | Robert Sheckley | Everett Barthold travels through time to find an ancestor look-a-like who can be used to defraud an insurance company. |
| 1958 | The Men Who Murdered Mohammed | Alfred Bester | Comedy in which a professor travels back in time to kill someone by killing their grandparent, but the results confound him. Explores many time travel scenarios in a short story format. |
| 1959 | —All You Zombies— | Robert A. Heinlein | Circular paradox – the hero is both his own mother and his own father; in addition he manipulates his younger self using a time machine to make his own birth happen. |
| 1959 | The Day We Explored the Future | Donald Keith | Boy Scouts find an abandoned time machine and visit the year 4000 AD. (First of a 23-story Time Machine series appearing 1959–1989 in Boys' Life.) |
| 1960 | The Weirdstone of Brisingamen | Alan Garner | Colin and Susan go back in time in the caves of Alderley Edge in Cheshire – crystal bracelet, magic great wolf included. |
| 1961 | Danny Dunn, Time Traveler | Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams | A couple of teenagers use their professor's time machine to study the history of the US. |
| 1962 | Fantastic Four vol 1 No. 19 | Stan Lee and Jack Kirby | The Fantastic Four travel to Ancient Egypt, and meet Pharaoh Rama-Tut, who is really another time traveller, from the 31st century. First appearance of Marvel Comics time-travelling villain Kang. |
| 1963 | The Other End of the Line | Walter Tevis | George Bletzo mistakenly call his own phone number and talks to his own person in a few months into the future. Predestination in play. |
| 1964 | Time Tunnel | Murray Leinster | Large immobile masses of iron in the earth's crust enable two-way travel between two points in the planet's history. |
| 1964–present | Doctor Who | various authors | More than 530 original novels and novelisations based on the popular TV show. |
| 1965 | The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream | G. C. Edmondson | Ensign Joe Rate, "captain of a wooden ship in a predominantly atomic navy," is transported, with his ship and crew, first back to the time of the Vikings, then to the time of the Romans. |
| 1966 | The Green Bronze Mirror | Lynne Ellison | Teenage girl finds ancient mirror buried in sand, looks into it, is transported back in time to the Roman Empire – where she is mistaken for a runaway slave. |
| 1966 | The Man From When | Dannie Plachta | A man inadvertently destroys the world in order to travel back eighteen minutes in time. |
| 1968 | Hawksbill Station | Robert Silverberg | A time machine is used by an oppressive government for deporting political prisoners a billion years in the past, to the Pre-Cambrian era. |
| 1969 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | A man is randomly traveling through time in his life jumping from one event to another in no particular order. |
| 1969 | Up the Line | Robert Silverberg | Time travel as guided tours to past historical events. |
| 1969 | The House on the Strand | Daphne du Maurier | Drug-induced trip back to 14th century Cornish Village. |
| 1969 | Behold the Man | Michael Moorcock | A man travels in a time machine to 28 AD, hoping to meet the historical Jesus. |
| 1970 | Chronocules | D.G. Compton | A millionaire establishes a research village to experiment with time travel. |
| 1970 | Time and Again | Jack Finney | Uses hypnosis to travel through time. |
| 1970 | The Year of the Quiet Sun | Wilson Tucker | The government uses a forward-traveling time machine to survey the future and adjust its policies accordingly. |
| 1972 | Time's Last Gift | Philip Jose Farmer | Four scientists/anthropologists travel from 2070 A.D. to 12,000 B.C. |
| 1973 | Time Enough for Love | Robert A. Heinlein | Lazarus Long travels in time to 1916 and falls in love with his own mother. |
| 1973 | The Man Who Folded Himself | David Gerrold | Main character receives a belt that allows him to travel through time. Complications ensue. |
| 1975 | Bid Time Return | Richard Matheson | A young man sees an old photograph of a woman, and through hypnosis travels back in time from 1980 to 1912 to meet her. Basis of the 1980 film Somewhere in Time. |
| 1977 | Time Storm | Gordon R. Dickson | A cosmic anomaly sweeps the Earth, subdividing the surface into irregular zones whose "present" is a randomly determined historical period of the past or future, which changes at irregular intervals. One man attempting to rescue his ex-wife accumulates a group of refugees from throughout history. |
| 1977 | Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation | Larry Niven | A half-finished Tipler cylinder is discovered by a future human explorer. When the leader decides to complete it, his civilization is destroyed by a nova. |
| 1978 | The Very Slow Time Machine | Ian D. Watson | An enigmatic traveler from the future, in a time vessel which cannot be breached, baffles scientists in his past. (His messages include: "you must travel through time by an equal amount of accumulate hindward potential...") |
| 1979 | Time After Time | Karl Alexander | H.G. Wells builds a time machine, which is stolen by Jack the Ripper so he can escape the authorities and continue his killing spree. |
| 1979 | Morlock Night | K.W. Jeter | What happened when H.G. Wells' time machine returned from the future. |
| 1979 | Closing the Timelid | Orson Scott Card | A man uses time travel to experience the sensation of death. |
| 1980 | Timescape | Gregory Benford | Use of tachyons to warn scientists of the past about an upcoming disaster. |
| 1980 | Thrice Upon a Time | James P. Hogan | Messages are sent back through time which deletes the timeline in which it exists. |
| 1980 | A Rebel in Time | Harry Harrison | Time machine misuse. U.S. Government aids the Confederacy with submachine guns. |
| 1980 | Kindred | Octavia Butler | Dana, an African American woman, is inexplicably transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early 19th century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, an African-American woman who was born free but forced into slavery later in life. |
| 1980 | The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | Douglas Adams | Milliways is frozen in the last moment of the universe before it succumbs to final entropy, requiring time travel to reach it. Menu prices are astronomical, but patrons are advised to deposit a penny in a bank account now. By the time a patron reaches the final moment of history, compound interest will have transformed the penny into a fortune large enough to pay the bill. |
| 1980 | The Man Who Loved Morlocks | David J. Lake | H.G. Wells' time traveller confronts the Morlocks again, this time equipped with a camera and revolver. |
| 1981 | The Many-Colored Land, first book of the Saga of the Pliocene Exile series | Julian May | Time travellers from the late 21st/early 22nd century go through a one-way time portal to the Earth's Pliocene period, already controlled by humanoid extraterrestrials. |
| 1982 | Life, the Universe and Everything | Douglas Adams | Time travel paradoxes form the basis of broad comedy, as in the case of the ancient poet Lallafa. |
| 1983 | Millennium | John Varley | In the far distant future, a time-travel team snatches the passengers of a plane collision, leaving prefabricated bodies behind for the rescue teams to find. Basis of the 1989 film. |
| 1983 | The Anubis Gates | Tim Powers | In 1983, a millionaire discovers time-travel gates and organizes a trip to the past to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810. A professor hired by the millionaire is trapped in 19th-century London. |
| 1984 | "The Toynbee Convector" | Ray Bradbury | A stagnating civilization of the 1980s is revitalized when a man produces evidence of a future utopia, apparently obtained through time travel. Mankind is inspired by the evidence to actually achieve this utopia. |
| 1985 | Star Trek: Ishmael | Barbara Hambly | Spock is aboard a Klingon ship when it travels back in time to Seattle in 1867. He discovers a Klingon plot to destroy the United Federation of Planets by assassinating an ancestor of his mother, a prominent local businessman who will later be instrumental in repelling an invasion by the alien Karsids. |
| 1986 | Running Against Time | Stanley Shapiro | In an effort to prevent the Vietnam War, a man travels back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. |
| 1987 | A Tale of Time City | Diana Wynne Jones | A girl, Vivian Smith, is kidnapped while being evacuated from London during World War II, and is caught up in a struggle to preserve history. |
| 1988 | Replay | Ken Grimwood | A man in 1988 suffers a heart attack and finds himself back in his life in 1963. |
| 1988 | Lightning | Dean Koontz | A time traveler from Nazi Germany interferes with the life of a young woman in the future. |
| 1989 | Hyperion | Dan Simmons | A great warrior, the Shrike, is sent from the future for an unknown reason. Main characters will travel through time in a very complex timeline. |
| 1990 | Four Past Midnight: "The Langoliers" | Stephen King | An airplane accidentally flies through a rip in space/time and appears in the "used time" of yesterday, in which dreadful "Langoliers" eat the past. |
| 1992 | The Guns of the South | Harry Turtledove | During American Civil War, South African white supremacists give the Confederacy AK-47s. |
| 1992 | From Time to Time | Jack Finney | Use of hypnosis to travel through time. |
| 1992 | Doomsday Book | Connie Willis | Travel through time from 2048 to 14th century, constrained by automatic avoidance of paradoxes. |
| 1992 | Outlander | Diana Gabaldon | Travel through time from 1940s to 1740s. Woman time travels through standing stones in Scotland. |
| 1992 | Dragonfly in Amber | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the second of a trilogy (after Outlander, 1991). 1960s to 18th century. |
| 1993 | Voyager | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the third of the Outlander series. Time travel from the 20th century to 18th century. |
| 1993 | The Cross Time Engineer | Leo Frankowski | 20th Century Polish Engineer is transported back to 13th century Poland 10 years before the Mongol invasion. |
| 1995 | The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary | Greg Egan | After the invention of a method for sending messages back in time, history of the future becomes common knowledge, and every person knows their own fate. |
| 1995 | The Time Ships | Stephen Baxter | Authorised sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. |
| 1996 | Drums of Autumn | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the fourth of the Outlander series. Time travel from the 20th century to 18th century. |
| 1996 | Timequake | Kurt Vonnegut | People in 2001 are transported back to 1991 to relive their lives. |
| 1996 | The Dechronization of Sam Magruder | George Gaylord Simpson | A scientist working in the year 2162 is thrown back in time 80 million years to the Jurassic period. |
| 1996 | Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus | Orson Scott Card | Researchers travel back in time to see Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in order to know the historical truth. |
| 1996 | Animorphs | K. A. Applegate | In book 11, the Animorphs and Visser 3 are sent back a few hours to the Amazon by a Saurio Rip, with the plot used again in Altermorph 1. The same concept is uses to sent the animorphs back to time to 65 million B.C. in Megamorph 2. In the Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor discovers a technology known as the Time Matrix, seen again in Megamorph 3. |
| 1997 | Making History | Stephen Fry | Two men in the present attempt to prevent the birth of Adolf Hitler. |
| 1997 | To Say Nothing of the Dog | Connie Willis | A comedy in which time travelers from 2048 travel back to the 19th century in order to find an artifact for a dictatorial wealthy woman; adventures occur in The Blitz and other occasions. |
| 1997 | Corrupting Dr. Nice | John Kessel | Modeled on 1930s screwball comedies; set in Cretaceous, 40 AD Jerusalem and 2060 AD. |
| 1998 | The Transall Saga | Gary Paulsen | A boy gets transported to a weird world by a blue light, only to discover that it is the dark future of planet Earth |
| 1999 | King of Shadows | Susan Cooper | A modern day boy switches places with a Shakespearean actor who needs to be cured by modern medicine so as to return to his own age and help Shakespeare to greater success on the stage. |
| 1999 | All of an Instant | Richard Garfinkle | People from three atemporal time tribes must unite to save the crystallization and fracturing of all of history. |
| 1999 | Timeline | Michael Crichton | Historians travel to and become stuck in the Middle Ages. |
| 1999 | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | J. K. Rowling | Hogwarts student Hermione Granger acquires a Time-Turner, a magical necklace that allows her to travel back in time on a daily basis in order to take an unusually large courseload. The device is later used to manipulate the events of a single night to aid a wrongly accused convict's escape. |
| 2001 | The Fiery Cross | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the fifth of the Outlander series. Time travel from the 20th century to 18th century. |
| 2001 | The Chronoliths | Robert Charles Wilson | Monuments from the future appear in the early 21st century, precipitating a global political collapse. |
| 2001 | Thief of Time | Terry Pratchett | Unfreezing and freezing of time using a small mechanism. |
| 2001 | Paratime | H. Beam Piper | Shorts stories of lateral time movement and alternate universes. |
| 2002 | Meridian | John Schettler | ForeWord Magazine Silver Medal Winner for Sci-Fi Book of The Year, 2002 – Sequels: Nexus Point, Touchstone, Anvil of Fate – The first ever experiment in Time travel sets off a "Time War" where opposing sides struggle to alter key events on the Meridians of Time. Five book series: Meridian, Nexus Point, Touchstone, Anvil of Fate, Golem 7. |
| 2002 | Night Watch | Terry Pratchett | Character interacts with a younger version of himself. |
| 2002 | Counting Up, Counting Down | Harry Turtledove | Time travel with the twin perspectives of a man who travels back in time for relationship stability. |
| 2002 | Thief! | Malorie Blackman | A huge storm traps a girl who is accused of being a thief and takes her into the future. |
| 2002 | Kaleidoscope Century | John Barnes | Takes place on Mars. A man has a virus that puts him to sleep every 15 years and he wakes 10 younger. |
| 2002 | 1633 | Eric Flint | West-Virginian town is taken back to the Thirty Years' War in Germany and gives them insight to the future. |
| 2003-ongoing | Haruhi Suzumiya | Nagaru Tanigawa | Two characters, Mikuru Asahina and Fujiwara, are time travelers from the future and many parts of the storyline involve time traveling. |
| 2003 | The Time Traveler's Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | Man with a rare genetic disorder unpredictably travels in time, living his life out of sequence. |
| 2004 | Axis of Time | John Birmingham | A naval task-force from 2021 is accidentally sent back to the battle of Midway. |
| 2004 | The Spark of God (orig. title: L'Éclat de Dieu) | Romain Sardou | Describes the First Crusade and the beginning of the Knights Templar in the future. |
| 2004 | Pen Pal | Lou Antonelli | Loops in a man's life told through a narrative that goes from future to present. |
| 2004–2005 | Warcraft: War of the Ancients Trilogy | Richard A. Knaak | A human, a dragon and an orc travel back in time to help save Azeroth from the Burning Legion. |
| 2005 | A Breath of Snow and Ashes | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the sixth of the Outlander series. Time travel from the 20th century to 18th century. |
| 2005 | Island in the Sea of Time | S.M. Stirling | Nantucket is transported 3000 years back in time because of a space disturbance. |
| 2005 | Mammoth | John Varley | Multibillionaire clones a mammoth and sends it back in time. |
| 2006 | Sojourn | Jana G. Oliver | A Time Rover from 2057 returns to 1888 London in search of a missing time tourist only to be caught in the Jack the Ripper murders and the history-changing plots of a mysterious group of shape-shifters called Transitives. |
| 2006 | The Plot to Save Socrates | Paul Levinson | Time travelers from 2042 to prevent Socrates from consuming hemlock. |
| 2006 | Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony | Eoin Colfer | Fifth book in the Artemis Fowl series. Artemis must pair up with his old comrade Captain Holly Short to track down the missing demon, before the spell that holds a demon island, Hybras, in limbo dissolves completely and the lost demon colony returns violently to Earth. Artemis also ends up saving Holly by manipulating time. |
| 2007 | Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey | Chuck Palahniuk | Characters participate in "Party Crashing" which can, under certain conditions, cause time travel. |
| 2007 | The Accidental Time Machine | Joe Haldeman | A research assistant stumbles across a forward-traveling time machine. |
| 2007 | The Lifehouse Trilogy | Spider Robinson | 3 books (Mindkiller (1982), Time Pressure (1988), LifeHouse (1997)) chronicle the story of visitors from Earth's future visiting the past to essentially harvest souls. |
| 2007 | Virtual Evil | Jana G. Oliver | A Time Rover from 2057 is sent to 1888 London to find Harter Defoe, the first time traveler who is slowly going insane. |
| 2008 | Madman's Dance | Jana G. Oliver | Abandoned in a Victorian insane asylum, memories erased, a Time Rover from 2057 must find a way to thwart a plot from the future that will remake British history. |
| 2008 | Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox | Eoin Colfer | Sixth book in the Artemis Fowl series. After Angeline Fowl contracts spelltropy, Artemis travels back in time eight years to when he was ten years old to find a lemur that can help cure his mother. The plot twist in the end of the book creates a circular timeline that started the series. |
| 2008 | Found | Margaret Peterson Haddix | Thirteen year olds Jonah and Chip find out that they are missing children from time and go on a journey along with Jonah's sister Katherine to uncover many secrets. |
| 2009 | An Echo in the Bone | Diana Gabaldon | Time-travel romance, the seventh of the Outlander series. Time travel from the 20th century to 18th century. |
| 2009 | Rubinrot | Kerstin Gier | A story about a girl, Gwendolyn Shepherd, who can travel in time with a machine, called chronograph. |
| 2009 | Sent | Margaret Peterson Haddix | Jonah, Katherine, Chip and Alex are sent back to 1483 to learn that Chip is actually King Edward V and Alex is his brother Richard, Duke of York. |
| 2010 | Expiration Date | Duane Swierczynski | Hardboiled pulp tale of an ex-journalist who discovers pills in his grandfather's medicine cabinet that transport him back in time to the 1970s. |
| 2010 | Sabotaged | Margaret Peterson Haddix | Jonah and Katherine go on yet another mission to return a missing kid named Andrea(really Virginia Dare) to her time in the Roanoke Colony. |
| 2010 | Blackout and All Clear | Connie Willis | Time travelers from 2048 go to the London Blitz during WWII to observe and end up being part of it. Novel published in two parts. |
| 2010 | How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe | Charles Yu | In search of his father, a time machine mechanic adventures through time accompanied by TAMMY and his ontologically valid dog, Ed, all while documenting his travels in a manual for future travellers. |
| 2011 | World of Warcraft: Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects | Christie Golden | Thrall, an orc shaman, travels through time and alternative reality in order to find his inner strength. |
| 2011 | 11/22/63 | Stephen King | A man travels through a time portal to 1958, intending to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting John F. Kennedy. |
| 2012 | Quantum 7 | T.R. MacKie | A young woman takes part in brain wave frequency research, and discovers she is traveling through space-time during the experiments. |
| 2012 | Amber House | Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, Larkin Reed | A teen girl uses psychometry to alter events in the past, changing the present and future. |
Read more about this topic: List Of Time Travel Science Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words short stories, time, travel, novels, short and/or stories:
“Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man’s mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.”
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)
“Some of us who sit upon this platform have many a time been clamored down, and told that we had no right to speak, and that we were out of our place in public meetings; far be it from us, when women assemble, and a man has a thought in his soul, burning for utterance, to retaliate upon him.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“An English man does not travel to see English men.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Kids are fascinated by stories about what they were like when they were babies and what they said and did as they grew. This sense of history and connectedness increases your children’s feelings of security and safety, and helps them build the ability to make healthy connections in the world at large.”
—Stephanie Martson (20th century)