Goldwin Smith Quotes

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

I love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

I love imagining being someone else in another time.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

It's not so much the dressing up, but I love the idea of moving and existing in a different time.

I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.

Some people would like the world to go back to the 1950s.

One of my favourite things to think about is, if you could be invisible and go back in time, where would you go? I've always said ancient Egypt. I would love to see them building the pyramids, and I've always had a real fascination with medieval time and monarchy in medieval times.

I like the idea of stepping back into another time period.

The BBC TV programme 'Back In Time For Dinner' doesn't just have one of the cleverest titles ever. It is a more-than-usually-serious attempt to recreate the recent past, the day before yesterday.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.

People gravitate towards their own era, nostalgia therapy is a real thing that's being tinkered with.

I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.

American audiences love period pieces. America doesn't have a lot of old things. It's a new country so I think we're a little bit fascinated by that.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

I love going back in time, and the only time you can really do that is on a movie set.

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

There's a bridge to tomorrow, There's a bridge to the past.

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.