(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.
Every man today is the result of his thoughts yesterday.
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men... We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.
Think about it: No matter who you are, the past plays a large part in your life. I am all about living in the present as best as I can. Try as I might, there is only so much I am able to achieve on this front.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Never underestimate how history injects itself into the present.
I've always been fascinated by how the past impacts the present. For the first half of my career as a novelist, I wrote psychological suspense mysteries. I wanted to be a therapist but was told that while I was a fine diagnostician, I would be a terrible therapist because I wanted to solve everyone's problems.
There is maybe a cynicism because of my past as a writer.
Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can't help it. We're made by the events of our past, so there's no escaping it.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.
At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.
Yes... it wasn't over, it still isn't over.
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
History is weirdly dismissed as not having anything to do with the present moment.
The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.
