No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately – by reading. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
pastquotes
The lie is the future, one may venture to say […]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past.
The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me… All that’s left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears – I shall not find myself.
Why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?
past / present / remembering
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
books / conversation / past / reading