Bill Condon Quotes

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

History is complex.

I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future.

What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.

In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

The context of history proved invaluable.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I like stories. I like to figure out how history ties to the present.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

The true knowledge is not in the things, but in finding the connections between the things.

The past is the father of the present.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

Yeah well I think her relationships with people become really clear, and I think they all make tons of sense in line with Ultron as well.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.

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 discovered.

If structure does not tell us anything about function, it means that we have not looked at it correctly.

Movies and life become a little more symmetrical when you start asking for and looking for connections.

To teach details is to bring confusion; to establish the relationship between things is to bring knowledge.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.