Quotes About Past

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

I like stories. I like to figure out how history ties to the present.

One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense to Black folk. How does one narrate that?

Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.

Great, huge sobs for herself, for her relatives, for the torment and shame of her past, for losses which could never be recovered.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

No estimo res més, excepte l'ombra viatgera d'un núvol. El lent record dels dies que són passats per sempre.

There are times when I can't help thinking about the past. I know the present is the place to be. It's always been the place to be. I know I've been recommended by very wise people to stay in the present as much as possible, but the past sometimes presents itself. The past doesn't come as a whole. It always comes in parts.

Indeed, he was a contradiction. Ray Bradbury was a nostalgic visionary: He predicted the past and remembered the future.

What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

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

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Der Unterschied zwischen Gott und einem Historiker: Gott kann die Vergangenheit nicht ändern.

The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.

O blessed Letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you we doe conferre with who are gone, And the dead-living unto councell call: By you th' unborne shall have communion Of what we feele, and what doth us befall.

I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

It takes far less courage to cling to the past than it does to face the future".

It was a white pandemonium with the wrong past.

Our memories are filled with images that are doors into old scenes in our lives.