Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.

So what I tend to do is to think of today as the past. It's funny when you comin in first but you hope that you last.. You just hope that it lasts.

My lungs taste the air of Time,Blown past falling sands.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Nostalgia is partly illusion in that we remember things differently as we get older, etc. But that doesn't mean, when historians look back on the 1950s, say, from the year 2090, it won't be judged as a saner, slower, less narcissistic, more family-focused, and economically secure time.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.