Joanne Harris Quotes

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

The past is a present force.

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

I don't think you can erase history.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

‎The past is always an invented land.

We all have appointments with the past.

Everyone must learn from the past.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

The past is never where you think you left it.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

My country has no history, only a past.

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

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.