Pastness Quotes & Sayings

Grimm: Cat and Mouse (#1.18) (2012)
Edgar Waltz: You may think I'm a monster, but what I am is necessary. No society would survive without order. Free thought is not free. There's no such thing as revolution. The oppressed always become the oppressors and the cycle repeats itself over and over. The only way to win is to stay out of the cycle. You don't understand a word that I've been saying.
Rosalee Calvert: I'm sorry. I wasn't listening. — Jacob Grimm

To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake. — Philip Roth

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ? — Thomas Mann

I think of the pastness of the past: how the moment I am alive in, prisoned in, moves like a slowly tumbling form through darkness, the underground river. Not only ancient history - the mythical age of the brothers' feud - but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. — John Gardner

I'm Jewish ... We're a very nervous group. Paranoid. Anxiety-ridden. Maybe that Hitler thing made us a little jumpy. Nothing like a Holocaust to make you mind your Ps and Qs for a couple hundred years I always say. — Andy Kindler

Glimpse is a meeting of dreamers in the silent night sky. — W.D. Tuck

I think what my father appreciated was the science experiment of life. He had these kids, and they had their own experiences. He wanted us to discover the world for ourselves. — Ahmet Zappa

I have so many books on my shelves that I can now start a war with some country and have supplies for years to come throwing books at its citizens! — Ibrahim Ibrahim

The French Code for cheese is ALIVE. The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is DEAD. — Clotaire Rapaille

Evolution shows that in the long run, if the superior mixes with the inferior, the product is halfway between, and inferior to what you started with in the original superior group - in other words, mongrelized. — George Lincoln Rockwell

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past
or more accurately, pastness
is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past." p. 15
" ... But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands." p. 153
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) — Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence — T. S. Eliot

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives. — Barbara Kruger

Like their ancestors, Louise and her parents klutzed away their days. — Henrik Drescher

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense
Of joy.
I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision (1974) — Robert Penn Warren