Siri HustvedtThere is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
About This Quote
To say that the past is important is not to say that we should ignore the future. It is to say that we cannot imagine the future except as a form of repetition of the past. But, as we have seen, human experience is not perfectly repeatable: we know that we changed and were changed by our past. The great achievement of art and literature, therefore, is to re-create and re-imagine the past in order to make it live again.
Source: The Summer Without Men
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