Past Representation Quotes

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

It was important to me to make a film where I don't show the past but where the spectators can see the past.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.