PAST QUOTES V
quotations about the past
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
keynote address at the Open Source Convention, OSCON, July 24, 2002
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
JOHN ASHBERY
"37 Haiku"
My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.
STEVE MARABOLI
Unapologetically You
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Cave
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
All the past is not worth one today.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"New Year"
I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
The Hour of the Dragon
What is it about the past? I can never understand it. Why is it so powerful? Why does it appeal to us as if it had some extraordinary pearl of meaning that we can't find in our present lives?
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
The past was bitter and dry and ashes in his mouth, its bone arms clasped him like some old desiccated lover he could not be shut of.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
The past was another country and one which the movement of time's tectonic plates pulled further away every year.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
The past is as locked in stone as a Jurassic fossil, but by our daily actions, we continuously change the future.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
The past is referred to as being dead; but it is terribly alive.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel. Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
You read the past in some old faces.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The Underground
Nothing's ever done.... No matter what you do, or what you pretend, the past is there. You can't ignore it.
JOHN SAUL
When the Wind Blows
past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud
SAMUEL BECKETT
How It Is