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Past Quotes

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Past Quotes

“The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.”

Ifs Littles Past Form Air Strange Bird Embrace Setting Settings Chains Halls Flew Alchemy Unbroken Timelessness Larks Ascending Anglo Saxon English Music

Author:Peter Ackroyd

“I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence.”

“The only living life is in the past and future - the present is an interlude - strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.”

Past Life Is Strange Bears Witness Live Life Strangeness

Author:Eugene O'Neill

“We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.”

Light Age Past House Magic Streets Strange Wander Pauses New Orleans

Author:Grace King

“It is indeed strange that with all the knowledge we have gained in the past hundred years we preserve and practice the methods of an ancient and barbarous world in our dealing with crime. So long as this is observed and exercised there can be no change except to heap more cruelties and more wretchedness upon those who are the victims of our foolish system.”

World Years Long Past Practice Crime Strange Hundred Method Victim Ancient Foolish Cruelty Preserves Wretchedness

Book:The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life

“Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.”

Mind Looks May Country Reason Body Past Strange Ghost Welcome Generosity Reason Why Dimensions Shore Frightening Mind And Body

Author:Martin Amis

“In that instant when I had seen... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.”

Eye Past Stars Strange Eternity Lays Depth Instant Cosmos Makers Splendor Vistas

Book:Last and First Men, & Star Maker: Two Science-fiction Novels

Source: Last and First Men, & Star Maker: Two Science-fiction Novels

“Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.”

“It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.”

Thinking Trying Wells May Facts Past Law Strange Equal Degrees Fundamentals Opening Our Thoughts Backwards Metaphysical Opening Up

Book:Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Source: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

“I guess it would fall into the stalker category more or less. I was being stalked by a mime - silent but maybe deadly. Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of 'Bringing Out the Dead' and start doing strange things. I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action and I haven't seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling.”

Ideas Action Past Fall Security Havens Strange Silent Producers No Idea Categories Strange Things Mime

Author:Nicolas Cage

“What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess!”

Seems Past Joy Strange Fishes Fragments Fling Aroma

Author:Anne Bosworth Greene

“There is a structural difference between the way that Europe views Israel, and America views Israel. The European view is informed by the importance of colonialism in Europe's past. So for Europeans we are like Belgiums in the Congo, or the French in Alger, or the British in India. Strange interlopers in somebody else's land. But in fact, we [Israeli] have been here for 4,000 years. This is our ancestral homeland.”

Way Years Has Beens Facts America Past Differences Views Land Strange Europe India Importance Israel British Colonialism Israeli Homeland Congo

Author:Benjamin Netanyahu

“What do sad people have in common? It seems they have all built a shrine to the past and often go there and do a strange wail and worship. What is the beginning of Happiness? It is to stop being so religious like that.”

People Seems Past Religious Common Strange Worship Built Shrines

Author:Hafez