Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

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

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

For me to grow, I have to know about the foundation that came before.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

Man is a history—making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

No people can live in the past - not even in its own past. But if it no longer has a link with its history, it must of necessity perish. Persia, crowded with hardship and glory, ordeals and hopes. With the help of the Almighty, the lessons of the past constitute the best guide for the citizens of the future.

It's important to always mix the past with the present. I think that makes it feel more authentic and real.