The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.
The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.
I do not believe in any legacy. The past is dead and gone.
Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.
People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.
OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.
Some failed states have no one but themselves—or rather their corrupt or brutal political elites—to blame. Others never had a chance to start with…, trapped between a no-longer-usable past and a not-yet-accessible future.
I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.
She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.
In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul.
In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
The past has a lobby …; the future does not have a lobby.
Writing history is writing the soul of the past...
Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.
Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones and bones of the past.
