William Faulkner Quotes

The past is more than a memory.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

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

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them.

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

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

The past is the present and the future too.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us

We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.

The more you read about history, the more you realize that there is nothing new under the sun.