History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For most of human history, there was a ruling class and then there was everybody else. If you were part of everybody else, it wasn't your job to imagine a different future, different ways of doing things. So, imagination is a fairly modern phenomenon.
We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger.
You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.
With thoughts of the past and concerns about the future, we rob ourselves of a full experience of the present.
How we think about the future and the past determines everything about how we think about our situation as human beings.
It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.