Thursday, January 30, 2025

I’m editing a book of King family history, and @ayjay’s Breaking Bread With The Dead has been a welcome companion. It’s yielded a few quotes that may find their way to the top of a chapter:

LP Hartley in The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun:

The past is never dead; it’s not even past.

Francis Spufford in The Child That Books Built:

Usually Americans focus on the future, and kick yesterday impatiently out of tomorrow’s path. On the prairie, on the other hand, people shrewdly suspected that the past had survival value, and they were, to boot, stubborn. You had to be stubborn to stay. You had to be stubborn to go on making the farmer’s bet against drought and deluge every year… You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.