Past Quotes - Page 171

The children's writer not only makes a satisfactory connection between [the writer's] present maturity and his past childhood, he also does the same for his child-characters in reverse - makes the connection between their present childhood and their future maturity. That their maturity is never visibly achieved makes no difference; the promise of it is there.

Present unhappiness is selfish; past sorrow is compassionate.

Most of my books have caused distribution and printing problems in the past.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

The terrorists who have succeeded in carrying out spectacular attacks against Western targets in the past have been college-educated, technically proficient men who are capable of manufacturing and deploying chemical, radiological, and biological weapons. Al Qaeda attracts the kind of highly educated men who one day might be able to pull off such an attack.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

In just the past century we have almost doubled the percentage of fat in our diets--from 20% in 1910 to about 35% today.

Cale is my signature character in the Forgotten Realms. The most popular character I've written. He's a thief, an assassin, and eventually, a priest who stabs his own god in the chest. Always trying to slip his past, but never succeeding. Dark dude. Brooding dude. Born killer. But honorable, still.

Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.

My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years.

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it.

Few great men would have got past personnel.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

I don't know of any other creature on earth other than man that will sit in a corner and cry because of some painful experience in the past.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.

I can't change the past, but I can try to make a better future for me.

In preparing the present volume, it has been the aim of the author to do full justice to the ample material at his command, and, where possible, to make the illustrations tell the main story to anatomists. The text of such a memoir may soon lose its interest, and belong to the past, but good figures are of permanent value. [Justifying elaborate illustrations in his monographs.]

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

Forgivness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed

The past assumes the nature of the present.