Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

That kind of creaming off the pretty postcard image of the past, I think, is a road to nowhere.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

In society at large, … nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making it needlessly negative about our current situation.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

The problem with relying on nostalgia for commentary is that people only remember the good things.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.

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.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

Such violent propensity have men to complain of the present times.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

I don't buy into the glory days thing. I think every time has its great things to it. The '60s were such a glorious time but it's easy to forget that there was all sorts of bullshit too.