Sarah Dessen Quotes

I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

I'm fascinated about how past events shape our perception of current events and how they make us the people we are.

The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.

You cannot not know history.

I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

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 is the present day consideration of what went before.

Being in London has really taught me how important history is. Just having information of the past. It helps you predict the future, which is all we really have as, you know, humans.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

The past is more than a memory.

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

If we tried To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure The future would not stand.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.