The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: history, past

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan

He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.

The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward of dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more – or less – virile. Soothsayers, poets and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.

Don’t deny the past. Remember everything. If you’re bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.

Jeanette Winterson

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

Robert Penn Warren

But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes–to me a beatitude–is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women–or men–can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena.

Lawrence Lessig

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

Eça de Queirós

History is always a grand fantasy… To reconstruct is to invent.

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.