Quotes About Past

I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.

And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.

futuro, a partir de cierto punto, es solo una necesidad de vivir en el pasado.

Quando si è al mondo da poco è difficile capire quali sono i disastri all'origine del nostro sentimento del disastro, forse non se ne sente nemmeno la necessità. I grandi, in attesa di domani, si muovono in un presente dietro al quale c'è ieri o l'altro ieri o al massimo la settimana scorsa: al resto non vogliono pensare. I piccoli non sanno il significato di ieri, dell'altro ieri, e nemmeno di domani, tutto è questo, ora.

Lo observé con atención. Él era exactamente así. No quedaba nada que pudiese interesarme de él. No era siquiera un fragmento del pasado, era solo una mancha, como la huella que una mano dejó años atrás en una pared.

Com'era friabile il passato, franava di continuo, le veniva addosso.

no siento ninguna comprensión por la que yo era entonces.

Speaking, I wished to eliminate both me and him, in that bed, different from the children of long ago. We had in common only the violence we had witnessed.

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence.

y a veces, al notarla tan feliz, me asaltó una nostalgia genuina por un tiempo que, no obstante, consideraba pasado para siempre y mal desenterrado por su fantasía en exceso afectuosa.

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .

The struggle is due to the fact that the present — the entire present — even that of the "I" who writes, letter by letter — can't maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.

De dónde llegan las fechas y a dónde van? Viajan un año entero y con la precisión de una saeta se clavan en el día señalado, nos muestran un pasado, un presente en el espacio, nos deslumbran y se apagan.

Luchaba entre varias memorias y la memoria de lo sucedido era la única irreal para él.

Han pasado tres años, imposible revivirlo. -Para poder olvidar, primero hay que recordar.

History does not need explanatory principles, but only words to tell how things were.

Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly—and not without melancholy—in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.

Psychoanalysis is based on Freud's theories of infantile development: it includes the idea that no one, however mature, entirely outgrows his or her infantile past.

It occured to me that we will never be young again.

By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

That part of his life was over; and now, lying on the dense mat of grass, he knew in one sense it always had been. But it was fun remembering … The

El tiempo no podía cambiar el pasado, pero traía paz.

El pasado está lleno de futuros perdidos.

Así como no hay caso de parar el reloj, tampoco se puede devolver el tiempo.