“Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present.”
Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 12, “It Goes So Fast” (p. 598)
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Kim Stanley Robinson 98
American science fiction writer 1952Related quotes

“Time goes from present to past.”
Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

Thích Nhất Hạnh here quotes and interprets the "Ten Penetrations" of the Avatamsaka Sutra
The Sun My Heart (1996)
Context: The tenth penetration is, "All times penetrate one time. One time penetrates all times — past, present, and future. In one second, you can find the past, present, and future." In the past, you can see the present and the future. In the present, you can find the past and future. In the future, you can find the past and present. They "inter-contain" each other. Space contains time, time contains space. In the teaching of interpenetration, one determines the other, the other determines this one. When we realize our nature of interbeing, we will stop blaming and killing, because we know that we inter-are.

“I do not ask you about the dead past. I bring you to the living present.”
1860s, Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)
Bishop visits Virginia City to give homily at final St. Mary's Mass https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2008/sep/08/bishop-visits-virginia-city-to-give-homily-at-fina/ (September 8, 2008)
“Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers.”
[e2s3p4$ofd$1@reader1.panix.com, 2006]
2000s
“He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present.”
Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 11 (p. 130)

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 227
Context: The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.