Quotes About Past

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

For the first time back then, I thought about everything seriously. The past and the future, both equally unknowable, and also this ongoing situation that the consulates call "transitory" but that we know in everyday language as "the present.

Remember me but forget my fate.

If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

How would the world change, Father Gervase wondered, if one could look for and see goodness, whatever human guise it was cloaked in, if one could see that potential in everyone and acknowledge not only the piousness of the saints but the complications of their past, the potential in sinners before they became saints.

That was the cruelty of memory. The way it could ambush you.

She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday's weather.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

We make a stage set out of my past and stuff painted puppets into it. We make a bridge toward my future and I cry to you: I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.

I am ugly, submerged in my own past and my own madness

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go back down, into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

The more I ponder a bright post–self-loathing future, the less possible—the less allowable—it seems. Thus since I surely have no future—because I deserve no future—I have just the past. Which I wasted hating myself. Which I regret. The brighter a putative post–self-loathing future seems, the worse my past appears, thus more regrettable. Self-loathing taught me this.

There are many possible futures, but only one past. This makes the past feel inevitable, as even the tiniest of twigs now looks like the thickest of branches because it's the only thing you can see.

El hecho de que la forma en la que yo viví la experiencia del aborto, la clandestinidad, forme parte del pasado no me parece un motivo válido para que se siga ocultando.

Pourquoi non. Je suis fascinée par l'« âme russe », ou l'« âme soviétique », ou par l'URSS entière, à la fois si proche, physiquement, culturellement (dans le passé) et si différente (pas le même sentiment vis-à-vis de la Chine, de l'Inde, plus radicalement autres Ã¢â'¬â€œ propos raciste ?).

meer dan ooit zou ze nu vat willen krijgen op het licht dat spoelt om inmiddels vergane gezichten en tafellakens overladen met verdwenen voedsel, het licht dat al aanwezig was in de verhalen tijdens zondagse familie-etentjes uit de kindertijd en dat onverpoosd op de dingen is blijven neerdalen zodra ze tot het verleden gingen behoren, een licht van vroeger.

Je ne suis nulle part dans le temps. Il est l'ange qui fait revivre le passé, rend éternel.

La distanza che separa il passato dal presente si misura forse dalla luce che scivola sui volti, proietta le ombre, disegna le pieghe di un vestito di una foto in bianco e nero; dalla sua chiarezza crepuscolare, qualsiasi sia l'ora in cui è stata scattata.

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened.

In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.