Great Quote

I read a wonderful book this past week:  Transatlantic, by Colum McCann.  The story is not related in any way to what I am writing, but the style of the book really intrigued me - multiple stories, with real and fictional characters, coming together over continents and time periods.  It gave me some new thoughts about what I'm writing and how I might solve my 'construction' problem.  There is a wonderful quote at the beginning of the book.  I've read it over and over and really love it:

No history is mute.  No matter how much they own it,

break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to

shut its mouth.  Despite deafness and ignorance, the 

time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.

                                                                                    -Eduardo Galeano

This is the idea behind the story that I want to tell of Lowell.  It is not just the story of women workers, or the labor movement, or the textile industry. . .  It is, of course, all of that, but it is also about how the past leads to the present, and how the present reflects the past and shapes our understanding of it.