Quotes About Past

Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

The web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal.

Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost.

No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.

What I'm going to tell you now, he said, may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.

Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.

La política de aquellos cuya meta está más allá del tiempo es siempre pacífica; son los idólatras del pasado y el futuro, del recuerdo reaccionario y del sueño utópico, los que desencadenan las persecuciones y las guerras.

El pasado ya no tenía formas ni el futuro nubes.

No pedía ya la libertad, sino la memoria

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

He was married once, but it was so long ago that he forgot about it. Before the war, his wife ran away with an actor, having fallen for his velvet jacket and lace cuffs.

C'est une souffrance étrange. Doucement. -Mourir de nostalgie pour quelque chose que tu ne vivras jamais.

Morir de nostalgia por algo que no vivirás jamás.

La gente registra la convinzione, tipicamente barbara, che il passato è utile solo quando e dove può diventare, immediatamente presente.

Nous sommes un cimetière à la dérive.

Vi imate ružna sje?anja, a ružna sje?anja kvare život. - Život je ružan, Marie. Život kvari sje?anja.

For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.

She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.

Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?

Places had echoes- and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.

The reunion, she decided, was an unnecessary and stressful complication to life. We did not need to reheat cold dishes from the past.