The 1949 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, William Faulkner, writes in his Requiem for a nun the following lines:
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
As an apt adage, it resurrects time and again. As we try to move beyond communal hatred, misogyny, superstition, religious dogma and authoritarianism, the line utters itself through and again everytime we falter. Our ambition is not trivial by any stretch of the imagination, but that we do not yet know how to rebuild our dreams when they break is alarming and disappointing.
Barack Obama quotes the above line in his preface to Dreams from my father. The book is based in Southern American landscape, like much of Faulkner's other writings.