Past Influences Quotes

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

Nobody wants to get rid of their life experiences - you are who you are because of them, no matter if they're good or bad.

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

I'm a storyteller; that is what I do. And I'm particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.

I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.

Your circumstances do not determine what your life will be; they reveal what kinds of images you have chosen up until now.

History never exactly repeats itself, but it does some rather good impressions.

You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.

They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.

No generation can escape history.

Unless we know where we've been as a country, we don't know where we are or where we are going.

Our names were made for us in another century.

I have become the person I am today, as a result of both the successes and the scars in my life.

Usually when I sat down to draw a cartoon, it would be more of a reflection of things in my past. Or it could be something I had experienced that morning, or that week, or something I might know that's part of my background.

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

You, and you alone, decide what something means to you. Yet this is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings, experiences, understandings, or future fears. None of this has anything to do with what is going on right here, right now.