Past Obsession Quotes

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.

There's always that one guy that you will always go back to. Even though you date other people in between, you are always in the back of your mind hoping to run into that guy.

If I'm too busy looking in the past, how can I see what's in front of me with the future?

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s incomprehensible to someone who comes from a country where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared, where any nostalgia and concern for it is a sign of an attachment to the past…

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there’s any grudges I should start.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.

Why does everyone talk about the past? All that counts is tomorrow's game.