Robert Hughes Quotes

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.

I would go back to the past and watch one of the early Beatles shows, because they were such a massive part of cultural history. As a younger person, you feel you missed out on that.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

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

Going back was like a reunion for all the cast. We were all there. It was weird to have been away from it for a few months, and then, "Hey look, here we all are. I can still walk on these stilts. Wow, we all still fit in our costumes." It was nice to connect again, and then we went to Star Wars Celebration right after that. It's neat.

We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

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.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

The older you get the more you live in the past

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them. —Ditta

And for the briefest instant, it almost feels like we're together again.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.