Peter Ackroyd Quotes

I always had my roots in the past.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

It's good to look back and know where you come from.

I think these people have betrayed or have forgotten their ancestors.

My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

I love the past. There are parts of the past I hate, of course.

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

I think it's really important for me not to forget where I came from.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

It's not like I pretend the past doesn't exist or that I'm not proud to be a part of it.

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

And so much of my life has been about returning home and longing for home, wanting my children to know about my roots. And I thought I can't be the only one to feel this way so I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.

We're trying to let people see what their grandfather told them about.

… history does not belong to us but rather we to it

My mother told me when I left for college, 'Never forget your roots,' and I never have.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

I feel like our history and our roots make us who we are.

I think that our comfort is in our history.