Anachronisms Quotes & Sayings

Someday when we get around to writing a genealogy of our failures, inadequacies, and disappointments, an important place in such a study will be the books we never read, for whatever reason. Aside from the music we never listened to, the movies we never watched, or the old archives and maps we never explored, the books we never read will be one of the indicators of our anachronisms and our flawed humanity. — Boris Gunjevic

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them - the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute. — Rafael Sabatini

President of the Society for Creative Anachronisms. — Arthur C. Clarke

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational. — Hugh Mackay

I want to encourage you to place yourself totally into God's hands and allow Him to be the Manager of your life. — Joyce Meyer

The ages live in history through their anachronisms. — Oscar Wilde

Why did you leave him?"
The sigh that was Nora's first answer billowed out in front of her in a cloud of white.
"Winter," she finally said, "can be so beautiful and so cruel. Cruel and cold. And if you live in the presence of winter you never have summer." Nora stepped close to him and put her nose at his cheek. "You smell like summer. — Tiffany Reisz

The difference between magic and miracles is this. Magic is when you use your mind to tell the Universe what you want.
Miracles is when you ask the Universe what it wants and how you can serve it' — Marianne Williamson

Don't you think you would attract attention?' said the Medical Man. 'Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms. — H.G.Wells

More and more believers are tasting the same despair the world lives in because they have chosen to "walk ... as other Gentiles walk, in the [emptiness] of their mind."8 — Jim Berg

There are a lot of anachronisms in Washington, but the need to periodically raise the debt limit by Congressional vote is certainly one of them. — Roger Altman

One area of the Book of Mormon that does bother some is what they see as anachronistic doctrine; that the Book of Mormon has Christian doctrine prior to the coming of Christ; that it has seemingly New Testament doctrines appearing centuries before Jesus arrives, and it seems to be representing a form of Christianity existing in the New World where there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that archaeologically. Christianity is invisible in the New World prior to the coming of Columbus, and so those things seem like clear anachronisms to people looking at it in that way. — Daniel C. Peterson

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms. — Roman Jakobson

Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me - just a little. — Charles Dickens

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action. — George Orwell

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. — Alain De Botton

You wanted to wear the second amplifier. You have it. You want to go to Os Alta? Fine, we'll go. You say you need the firebird. I'll find a way to get it for you. But when all this is over, Alina, I wonder if you'll still want me. — Leigh Bardugo

September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East. — Martin Amis

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms. — Garry Kasparov

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms — Jorge Luis Borges

Lupin's condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes. Remus's — J.K. Rowling

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.
[Afterword] — Michael Chabon

The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard ... So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms. — George Orwell

If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history
a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils
people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. ' — Daniel Quinn

Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit. — James Dale Davidson

One day instead the old woman said kind words to her and gave her an awning on a stick to keep rain off (there has been much rain in purgatorium) — Ali Smith

We're never really taught that we have to think about our work before we can do it; much of our daily activity is already defined for us by the undone and unmoved things staring at us when we come to work, or by the family to be fed, the laundry to be done, or the children to be dressed at home. — David Allen

I found the book, Qur'an,] in spite of "the contradictions, the absurdities, the anachronisms", "rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art. — Voltaire

Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out. — Ransom Riggs