Oscar Hijuelos Quotes

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality... Experience is the opposite of being creative.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it's very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

I'm really obsessed with the past.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

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.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Latin life is rich with warmth, family values and history. I want to bring that beauty into American homes.

Once a Catholic always a Catholic.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Those who cling to the past won't give up without a fight.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past