“Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

— Margaret Atwood

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Margaret Atwood 348

Canadian writer 1939

Engr.Abah Sule

“The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.”

H.P. Lovecraft book Pickman's Model

"Pickman's Model " - written 1926; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4 (October 1927)
Fiction

“A world of "if"s, but it would make no difference. If I could go back in time… but I couldn't. The past was behind me. The best thing now would be to stop looking over my shoulder. It was time to forget the past and look to the present and future.”

Darren Shan book Cirque du Freak

Source: A Living Nightmare

“Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). … The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably, this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past, and therefore to inheritance.”

Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 377.

“Your past, present and future sins will be placed upon your shoulders and not on the shoulders of the man who left us long ago.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Don’t cry for me, Grace. I’m not worth it. (Julian)
Yes you are! (Grace)
You are my saving Grace. Without you, I would never have known love. And I would never have known me again. (Julian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Fantasy Lover

Source: Fantasy Lover

“If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and […] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.”

Robert Penn Warren book All the King's Men

Source: All the King's Men (1946)

“Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

“I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?”

Connie Willis (1945) American science fiction writer

Source: Fire Watch (1982), pp. 129-130 in The Nebula Awards 18 edited by Robert Silverberg

“The light of other days is faded,
And all their glories past.”

Alfred Bunn (1796–1860) British businessman, librettist

The Maid of Artois (1836) set to music by Michael William Balfe. Compare: "Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed", Thomas Moore, Oft in the Stilly Night.

“Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

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Margaret Atwood 348

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