Focus Quote by Mark Bonnar

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the…

— Rudolfo Anaya

“the bog was already bigger than a king’s ego and at night darker and more dangerous than a badger’s arsehole—ye just really didn’t want…

— Kevin Hearne

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

— W. H. Auden

The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways.

— Jennifer Gilmore

“Most young men and women (...) grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the…

— Eric Hobsbawm

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it…

— George Eliot

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which…

— Bernard Malamud

The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...For all his attention to…

— Elizabeth Kostova

“Reference to the deadness of the past is a way of staking a claim on it. But historians must be open, as ethnographers try…

— Robert A. Orsi

“His early book, not much noticed when it was published, was now on many reading lists, and the younger generation of historians accepted it…

— Saul Bellow

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about…

— Toni Morrison

I was looking for what was coming from a man's soul and a man's conviction. I didn't care about his past. If it was…

— Sam Phillips