“To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Tag: Past
We Just Had To
Our Scars
What a collection of scars you have. Never forget who gave you the best of them, and be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.”
— Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon (2002) dir. Brett Ratner
Nothing New Under the Sun
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
— Ecclesiastes 1:9, New International Version
William Faulkner on the Past
Giovanni Boccaccio on the Wrongs of Long Ago
Wrongs of long ago are more easily criticized than put right.”
— Giovanni Boccaccio, Andreuccio da Perugia’s Neapolitan adventures
The point is, what I’m tryin’ to tell you is, it’s no use gettin’ soppy about how good things used to be. Most times, today is better, all right?”
— Proinsias Cassidy, “Hitler”, Preacher AMC
“The truth is that there are two ways in which the future can become obsolete. One is through the inability to imagine the New: in this model, the idea of building a Tower never occurs to us; we are content to stay on the ground. The other happens when the New becomes so perpetual and unrelenting, when the construction of the Tower becomes so consuming, that we no longer have the luxury or the inclination to look up… You cannot have a future without a sense of the past, and there is no quicker way to make both obsolete than by insisting on the urgency and the singularity of the present.”
— Meghan O’Gieblyn on deep time and Long Now’s 10,000-year clock (via Erica Avey)
Lisa Marie Blair 