From Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels:

"History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the part we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history."

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