Past Quotes (page 70)
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We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Kurt Vonnegut
Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.
Gene Wolfe
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Anais Nin
Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?
Chuck Palahniuk
What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood, is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? And what's in prayer but this twofold force, to be forestalled ere we come to fall, or pardoned being down? Then I'll look up. My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer can serve my tern? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
William Shakespeare
I'm going to leave, I'm going to take my train. But behindthe existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind thesesounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If it weren't for me inviting Meena Harper over for dinner that night, the two of you would never have met, and this whole horrible mess would never have happened..."She paused dramatically, as if waiting for someone to jump in and say, Oh no, Mary Lou. None of this was you fault."But," Mary Lou went on, a little less self-confidently, "if I hadnt then you, Lucien, would just have gone on through eternity never knowing what true love is. And then how would you have felt?"Considerably better...
Meg Cabot
In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of...
Michael Crichton
Instead, I woke early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day’s sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon.
Sherman Alexie