Past Presence Quotes

Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence.

Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

Apparently, some physicists argue that time is curved. I suppose this means that the past is in some way still present.

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

There are many people like me who believe firmly, if somewhat incoherently, that pockets on this planet are filled with what humans have left behind them, both good and evil, and that any such spiritual accumulation can stay there forever, past definition of such a stern word.

The resulting prints of 'History's Shadow' make the invisible visible and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

And history's fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.