Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

It is hard to look back and talk about a set of disjointed experiences as though they were part of one smooth progression.

The past is another planet.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.

The past is never where you think you left it.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

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

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

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.

If you're using your imagination, you tend to look into the past for ideas.

The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

The past is what you take with you.