Basil Bunting Quotes

You can't change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward.

Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?

I think the beautiful thing about the past is that it leads you to the present.

I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

People often refer to bygone days as a simpler time. Perhaps, more accurately, my grandparents' generation focused better on what mattered. Traffic jams and minor quibbles with my husband Daniel pale in comparison with the worries that were faced on the home front and battlefield during the Second World War.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

If you think you have it tough, read history books.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

And as I ask for your forgiveness, I also ask for your support to keep all things in perspective and keep all things in proportion. The good of nine years versus the bad.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

O, would some Power give us, To see ourselves as others see us!

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

History will show you not all the answers, but it’ll tell you a lot of the questions to ask.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

I think perspective is a necessary, amazing thing.

At some point I got sick of people calling me Bonzo junior. But now that I'm older and wiser, I'm just honored to be mentioned in the same breath.

I love historical references.