Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Everyday decision-making around the world is constantly based on what came before us.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

For me, clothing has always been connected to history. That's what draws me in.

One should live with history round one.

Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.

The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.

I've been really inspired by my roots - my ancestors and Irish history.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

We have preserved the Book, and the Book has preserved us.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.