Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on the Past)

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), My Antonia (1918)

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on ‘Golden Moments in the Stream of Life’)

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”—English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on the Three Things a Nation Must Believe In)

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32^nd President of the United States, “Remarks at the Dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York,” June 30, 1941

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on Why ‘The Past Is Beautiful’)

“[T]he past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930, edited by Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie (1981)

Quote of the Day (Irving Howe, on American Culture’s ‘Indifference to the Past’)

“American culture is notorious for its indifference to the past. It suffers from the provincialism of the contemporary, veering wildly from fashion to fashion, each touted by the media and then quickly dismissed. But the past is the substance out of which the present has been formed, and to let it slip away from us is to acquiesce in the thinness that characterizes so much of our culture. Serious education must assume, in part, an adversarial stance toward the very society that sustains it—a democratic society makes the wager that it’s worth supporting a culture of criticism. But if that criticism loses touch with the heritage of the past, it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints.”—American editor and social and literary critic Irving Howe (1920-1993), “The Value of the Canon,” The New Republic, Feb. 18, 1991

Quote of the Day (Jay McInerney, on How New York Views the Past and the Future)

“New York has never been oriented toward the past…The past is if you can remember what you ate yesterday or who you slept with. And the future is, ‘Where are we going tonight?’”—Novelist Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) quoted in Brenda Cronin, “He’ll Still Take Manhattan,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 5, 2016

(Photograph of Jay McInerney taken on April 21, 2010, by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Link Between the Past and Posterity)

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”—Anglo-Irish orator and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, on Judging the Future by the ‘Lamp of Experience’)

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”—Virginia orator, governor, and revolutionary patriot Patrick Henry (1736-1799), speech to the Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775, in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, 9th ed., pp. 138–39 (1836, reprinted 1970).

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘People of Bygone Ages’)

“The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero, or a skillful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), The Guermantes Way (1913), Vol. III of In Search of Lost Time, translated by Mark Treharne

Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, on How ‘Everything Changes’)

“We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.” —Poet-singer-songwriter-memoirist Patti Smith, M Train (2015)

(The image accompanying this post, of Patti Smith performing at New York’s Bowery Ballroom,  was taken by her sister, Kimberly Smith, on Dec. 31, 2007.)