Amiri Baraka Quotes

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

The past is a present force.

Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Call us the future from your past.

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

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The past is more than a memory.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

I think the beautiful thing about the past is that it leads you to the present.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Things that came before, people and things and experiences - that does mean something to me. It doesn't mean I don't embrace the new, but I don't forget the past, either.

We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.

I am connected to the past in a way that keeps me going forward. Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

We are tomorrow's past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.