Laura Linney Quotes

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Everyday decision-making around the world is constantly based on what came before us.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

It's good to pass on stories.

The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority.

Things that came before, people and things and experiences - that does mean something to me. It doesn't mean I don't embrace the new, but I don't forget the past, either.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

History didn't begin yesterday.

It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

No," she said firmly. "I want you to stay when I go. Break tradition again, my love, and burn me alone in the home we built. I don't want you with me. You aren't done. You see too far ahead. You need to make the world in your thoughts a real one that our children can fly in." - Matalina to Jenks

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

People should make a stand for the things they love and want to see survive infinite generations.

Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.

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

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.