Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

Our parents were very prim and proper, but we always got one toy every day. That was a ritual. The money didn't really matter.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.

I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Nothing's changed except the dates on the newspapers. I'm in my same skin thinking the same old thoughts. The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.

I have lived through the best years of this country's history. The next generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad I don't have to live on into them.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

You tend to think that your time is either the best or the worst, and then when you have a sense of history, you'll realize actually, no, there were times things were quite gusty in the world. I mean, just think, nowadays most people will say they support the advancement of women, woman has been equal, the fact that we're so aware of the gustiness, in a sense, also speaks about the heightening of our own sensitivity.

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Most oldsters are fascinated by the Future, while the young love to look back to earlier days, especially their own.

A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.

If I have enough money to support myself, I'll just give stuff away. I just, I want people to see it and I want to be able to do this for a living, you know what I mean? So it's just a balance. If I'm not doing well for five years, then I'm selling stuff, but if I'm doing well and I can afford to give stuff away, I'll always do that.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

The real cultural war is between the culture of narcissism and what might be called the culture of renewal.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

You know you're getting old when kids start to dress like you used to and movies are made about your teen life.

All of a sudden it's twelve-year-olds who are contacting me, fifteen-year-olds, and they have very, very fascinating questions. However, they speak in a language of their age group which I have to learn first.