PAST QUOTES VII

quotations about the past

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale

Tags: Margaret Atwood


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


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


Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.

JOSEPHINE HART

Damage

Tags: Josephine Hart


The past is a closed door.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Year of the Flood

Tags: Margaret Atwood


The myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

ZADIE SMITH

White Teeth


The past is always a rebuke to the present.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

"Fugitive's Reunion"

Tags: Robert Penn Warren


Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
Of faith so nobly realized as this.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The Cathedral

Tags: James Russell Lowell


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


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


The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Sea

Tags: John Banville


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

GEORGE WECKMAN

"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, 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


The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.

EUGENE O'NEILL

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Tags: Eugene O'Neill


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


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


Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

JANE AUSTEN

Pride and Prejudice

Tags: Jane Austen


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


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


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