Shared Past Quotes

History is the memory of a nation

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

I went to college with James Coburn and Steve McQueen was a very good friend.

Sisters share the scent and smells... the feel of a common childhood.

I watch 'Take Me Out' mainly for Paddy McGuinness. When we were younger, we worked together as lifeguards at the Bolton Leisure Centre.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

A couple of years ago, I went to see a production of Wicked in San Francisco with a friend of mine, one that Patty Duke was in, and he said, "Do you want to meet her?" And I said, "Yeah!" And I went backstage, and she walked out of her dressing room, looked at me, and said, "I know you." And I went, "Well, uh, yeah, I was in My Sweet Charlie." And she said, "Yeah! You were the guy in the car on the road!" And I was. It was amazing.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

One thing that is almost always said to me is, I grew up with you. They are meeting me and feel that they actually grew up with me. I was with them during their play hours and thinking hours. I was a part of their childhoods. That's one of the most amazing things.

People, when they come up to me, are like, 'Did we go to high school together? Or did I make out with you at sleepaway camp?' And oftentimes, yes, that is the answer, because I went to a giant high school and made out with everybody.

No great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory

Shaz Khan and I, it turned out, went to school together in third grade.

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.

And then there is our personal history. Memories only we share. Things not another living soul would understand.

A community receives light from its history, it becomes aware of itself by remembrance of its history.

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

Yes, it's beautiful,' said Gilbert, looking steadily down into Anne's uplifted face, 'but wouldn't it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been no separation or misunderstanding . . . if they had come hand in hand all the way through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each other?

In a certain sense all men are historians.

Mauricio had a relationship with my granddad and especially my dad, because they played against each other with Instituto and Newell's Old Boys, and my uncle went to school with him when they were children.

We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.

No matter where we come from or where we're going, we've all got memories to contend with, and it's always best not to do this alone!

It's funny, I can talk to Dad about races we ran, or I can remember some races he's raced when I was there working on the car. I'm sure other athletes are the same, where they can remember what pitches they threw or what plays they ran.

Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.