Past Perception Quotes

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge – everything that ever happened is still here.

I do not know at first what it is that harms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to be fairer and truer in to-morrow's memory.

The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

‎The past is always an invented land.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

People tend to group together their favourite sitcoms and feel that they all took place in one spot named 'the past', but in fact all these sitcoms are spread over a long period of time, and all the terrible sitcoms that were on have been justifiably forgotten.

The past is just a story we tell ourselves.