“We cannot be rooted in the past forever. We must not be sentimental.”

“The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.”

“It may be that considerations of justice are a central element of ethical thought that transcends the relativism of distance. Perhaps this, too, comes from a feature of the modern world. We have various conceptions of social justice, with different political consequences; each has comprehensible roots in the past and in our sentiments. Since we know that we do not accept their past legitimations, but otherwise are not sure how to read them, we are disposed to see past conceptions of justice as embodiments of ideas that still have a claim on modern people. To this extent, we see them as in real confrontation with each other and with modern ideas.”

“The dead are the past and we cannot escape the past. Without the past there will be no future.”

“We cannot let go of the past enough to live in the present unless we are able to grieve our losses. We must deeply feel our emotional pain in order to accept that what is happening is not what we wanted.”

“We must not look at goblin men,We must not buy their fruits:Who knows upon what soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?”