John Trudell Quotes

History takes time... History makes memory.

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.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

The past is dead except for the life you give it

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

The past is where its supposed to be.

We are tomorrow's past.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

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.

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!

The past is always with us, for nothing that once was time can ever depart.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

The past is not a package one can lay away.