Quotes About Past

Maester Luwin says there's nothing in dreams that a man need fear.' 'There is,' said Jojen. 'What?' 'The past. The future. The truth." - Bran & Jojen

His time was past, her handmaid Irri declared. No man should live longer than his teeth.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood." "Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

I often spend half the night with ghosts, remembering times fifty years past as if they were yesterday. The mystery of a midnight visitor is a welcome diversion.

Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

I'm free of Tysha now, he thought. She's haunted me half my life, but I don't need her anymore, no more than I need Alayaya or Dancy or Marei, or the hundreds like them I've bedded with over the years. I have Shae now. Shae.

For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction.

How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body.

The red woman could see the future in the fire, but all that Davos Seaworth ever saw were the shadows of the past:

Luwin mester azt mondja, nincs semmi az álmokban, amit?l félni kellene. – Van – mondta Jojen. – Mi? – A múlt. A jöv?. Az igazság.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually dependable, but at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth. For a child, that sweetness, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.

You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

Dipping into the pitcher of the past, his father often said, can only sour the cup of the present.

Every generation has tended to look on the past with an air of condescension. I call it history snobbery, and your generation is smitten with one of the worst cases ever.

When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.