A Quote by Laura Esquivel

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

Laura Esquivel

Quote Topics

Everyone Individual Locked Locked Up Nation Past Recipes Up Well

Quote Author

Laura Esquivel
Mexican - Novelist
Born: September 30, 1950

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Eric Hobsbawm

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.

Paulo Coelho

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one. We cannot love when we feel fear.... When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all.

Gerald Jampolsky

Everyone has a past, and the downside to my life is that the past gets dragged up.

Tamara Ecclestone

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

George Steiner

The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.

William Pfaff

Yes, we have the judiciary, the Constitution, we're fighting racism on a daily basis, but these are all state efforts and are not the efforts of the individual. The individual has to commit to change, the individual has to look at the past and take accountability of the past; for the wound to heal we have to dress it together.

John Kani

There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

Terry Pratchett

Now, you can bring up the past, but anybody can bring up the past. Even my daughter brings up the past sometimes. She makes a lot of jokes about the things that I've done.

Metta World Peace

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

J. M. Coetzee

Secrets of the past! Who does not wish to keep the past locked in a cage like a ferocious beast? The rich are sleepless for fear of thieves. The respectable have to guard their reputations in the same way.

Munshi Premchand

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Susan Sontag

If something is buried in the past, leave it buried. . . . Such dwelling on past lives, including past mistakes, is just not right! It is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . In cases of marriage and family, . . . we can end up destroying so many others.