Confronting Past Quotes

But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

We need to be fearless in confronting our past as individuals and an institution. There are often things we regret about our past, but there is the possibility of making amends and of building on the acknowledgment of those things. Part of our vision of Emory is being ethically engaged, and that means wrestling about what it means to have these warts.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.

I would've written this story [Django] if [Barack] Obama were president or if he never existed. For one, I think it's time to tell a story that deals with this subject America has avoided for so long. Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities of their past that still affect them to this day. But America has been pretty slippery in the way that it has avoided looking slavery in the eye. I believe that's a problem.

For me, 'The Kite Runner' became about a guy who's emotionally shut down because he hasn't confronted his past.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

The idea of ignoring your past, only to confront it later in life, is a familiar experience whether you come here from Hungary or French Canada or Ireland.

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

I feel like we haven't dealt with the ghosts of America's past, and the way to deal with it is to confront it, so every time people see me, I want them to be reminded and to confront that ghost.

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it.

The Turkish judiciary has a very strong nationalist tradition, which is gradually changing, but only gradually. And since there was a nationalist outcry against Orhan Pamuk's remarks about Turkey's need to confront its past, I'm not surprised that one public prosecutor in an Istanbul borough should have decided to act. I don't expect the proceedings to lead to a conviction. But in any case one mustn't generalize and say that's the way Turkey behaves; it's the way one nationalist public prosecutor behaves.