Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 37 (p. 235)
“Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.”
Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic
ibid. <br class="br">Cited in: Ideas, not plots, inspire Jean-Luc Godard http://www.csmonitor.com/1994/0803/03121.html, csmonitor.com, August 3, 1994
“We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.”
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist
Source: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Ch. 11: The Unspoken Thing
Context: We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
“Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over.”
Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)
“Be not false about the past.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Variant: The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner
1
Variant: It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
Source: The Kite Runner (2003)
