Love Quote by David McCullough

McCullough’s line lands like a quiet corrective to the romantic myth of the “born” historian who simply follows curiosity from archive to bestseller. He insists on a double truth: devotion and difficulty aren’t opposites; they’re often the same experience seen from different angles. The sentence is plainspoken, almost homespun, and that’s the point. It demystifies craft without diminishing it.

The specific intent is to reframe love of work as a form of commitment rather than ease. McCullough, who spent years inside letters, diaries, and brittle municipal records before shaping them into lucid narratives, is defending the unglamorous middle: the long stretches of reading, verifying, organizing, cutting. “All sides” signals an affection not just for the performance of authorship but for the slog of research and revision. It’s a way of telling aspiring writers and historians: if it feels hard, you’re not doing it wrong.

The subtext is also ethical. For McCullough, history isn’t content; it’s responsibility. Getting the past right requires patience, humility, and an acceptance that certainty is earned, not assumed. That’s why the line works culturally: it pushes back against both hustle-culture bravado (“grind harder”) and effortless-genius branding (“follow your passion”). He offers a steadier model of creative labor: joy that includes friction, pleasure that coexists with discipline, admiration for the work precisely because it resists shortcuts.