Quotes About Past

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head. "I'm

a few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I'd left it.

THE NIGHT WAS A dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening.

it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment

And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.

Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

I would not be at all surprised to find out....personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by 'ageing', may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past - but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically.

The fight with my various forms of dissatisfaction tires me; but I know this is not a personal fight. When I talk about this with other women, they tell me they have to fight all kinds of guilt they recognise as irrational, usually to do with working, or wanting time for themselves; and the guilt is a habit of the nerves from the past, just as my happiness a few moments ago was a habit of the nerves from a situation that is finished.

In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we re capable --- in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

Too late, too late, too late; it had happened.

War had given Francis his respite, and success had brought him his final reward: the freedom he wished from his marriage. The licence, if he desired it, to go back to Russia. The knowledge, one supposed, that, severed from Philippa, he could allow the past to lie in peace, and cease troubling him.

The moment is past. The chessboard has gone; and the people. You must let me take the room from you too.

Should. Ought. Scenarios again, she thought crossly, which was how the mind persistently worked, using facts and assumptions left over from the past to draw conclusions that were frequently in error.

Every love's the love before In a duller dress.

De Profundis Oh, is it, then, Utopian To hope that I may meet a man Who'll not relate, in accents suave, The tales of girls he used to have?

Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our futures successes.

Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I'm afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself. Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim, agreed Reg earnestly.

How can I tell,' said the man, 'that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

Cómo puedo saber que el pasado no es una ficción inventada para explicar la discrepancia entre mis sensaciones físicas inmediatas y mi estado de ánimo?