Tag: present

Quote of the Day

The only reason for writing history, I think,is so we can try to understand the present. Because of that, the questions it seems relevant to us to ask about the past are informed by our experience of the present. You’re asking the past different questions from what people did fifty years ago, or will be doing in another fifty years.

“The only reason for writing history, I think,is so we can try to understand the present. Because of that, the questions it seems relevant to us to ask about the past are informed by our experience of the present. You’re asking the past different questions from what people did fifty years ago, or will be doing in another fifty years.” — Pat Barker, The Art of Fiction No. 243, The Paris Review (Winter 2018)

Quote of the Day

It is not true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.

“It is not true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.” — William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil