PAST QUOTES VII

quotations about the past

The past is a closed door.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: Margaret Atwood


The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy?

FELIX ADLER

Founding address of New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 15, 1876


A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself.

TOBSHA LEARNER

The Witch of Cologne

Tags: Tobsha Learner


The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.

JOAN DIDION

Where I Was From

Tags: Joan Didion


History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Evidence about the past is always partial, perspectival, and biased.

GEORGE WECKMAN

"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, April 1, 2016


As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

Tags: Margaret Atwood


While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life

Tags: Philip Zimbardo


Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Dance Dance Dance

Tags: Haruki Murakami


The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

CHARLES DE LINT

The Onion Girl

Tags: Charles de Lint


Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations

Tags: Marcus Aurelius


It's harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.

WILLIAM GIBSON

The Paris Review, summer 2011

Tags: William Gibson


It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.

JAMES BALDWIN

Notes of a Native Son

Tags: James Baldwin


To remember is to re-member, almost as if by re-membering we give something body again. It is no longer so much in the past, but being called to mind and brought into the present. To re-member is to re-present. And so we are saying that something in the past is not gone, it is here and now, in effect, if nothing else.

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

"Past Painfully Present", America Magazine, March 28, 2016


When we look back on our past there is often an element of fiction that enters the picture. The colours seem brighter or darker, the people more delightful or cruel, events are collapsed, mixed and reconfigured. Nevertheless our visions seem utterly convincing, at least to ourselves.

LAETITIA WILSON

"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016


Inheriting the past is to take part in a story that is still being told today.

LEO WU

"Where the past meets the present: Preserving historic homes in Alhambra", Alhambra Source, March 27, 2016


We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

Atoms of Thought

Tags: George Santayana


We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

Pulphead

Tags: John Jeremiah Sullivan


We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!

WILLIAM HAZLITT

"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners

Tags: William Hazlitt


Everyone knows ... that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.

GENE WOLFE

The Claw of the Conciliator

Tags: Gene Wolfe