Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Gaines

Gaines draws a clean, unsentimental line through American life: some people push against inheritance, and some people live inside it like a locked room. The bite is in the word "controlled". He is not describing nostalgia or tradition; he is naming a force that governs behavior, politics, and even imagination. The past, in this framing, is not background. Its the hand on the steering wheel.

The sentence works because it refuses the comfort of historical closure. "There will always" turns the idea into a permanent condition, not a phase we graduate from with better education or nicer rhetoric. Gaines is also slyly democratizing the struggle: change isnt reserved for heroes. "Men struggling to change" suggests effort without guarantee, an ongoing grind rather than a triumphal narrative. The struggle itself becomes the moral baseline.

Context matters: Gaines wrote from Louisiana, from the long shadow of slavery, Jim Crow, and the intimate, daily negotiations of dignity and survival that his fiction returns to again and again. In that world, the past isnt just memory; its land ownership, courthouse power, family silence, church authority, the stories a community allows itself to tell. To be "controlled by the past" can mean being trapped by trauma, but also benefiting from it and refusing to let go.

The subtext is a warning disguised as realism: history will keep producing both kinds of people. The question is which role you choose, and what it costs to keep choosing it.