Quotes About Past

But she had been too wrapped up with painful memory, uncomfortable reality.

But to see him again. To somehow free myself of the past completely.

No es fácil mirar el propio pasado, sobre todo cuando uno creía que se habían borrado todas las huellas.

It] had given him a powerful awareness of the fact that she had lived the past ten years, just as he had.

Guilt can eat away at you and destroy the future as well as the past.

Some kind angel must have granted me these few encounters with you in the past weeks, he said. I will live on the memories.

It had not after all been an isolated experience in the past, over and done with and to be relived only in memory. It was continuing into the present and the future.

And she did not want to be reminded of how Christopher had changed. She wanted to remember him, if at all, as he had been before.

But there is a difference between thinking of an absent friend and thinking of someone who used to be a friend and never will be again.

Her feelings for him were purely regrets for a past that might have been. He was not now the sort of man whom she would wish to captivate even if that were possible.

You see now why I cannot marry you? I would never be able to rid myself of the shame of my past. And you would not be able to forget, either.

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved. p. xx

For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there's suffering involved.

For all of memory's power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time—both short-term (the lost vehicle in a parking lot, the name at the tip of your tongue) and long-term (we made out in high school?).

But whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are.

You're making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself.

Mother's particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth's direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

How often now I just sit, with my elbows on the desk and my hands holding my face bold and upright, and stare into the past.

The first stone represents the past—worries, bad memories, remorse. Understand?" "I do," I say. "The second stone stands for the present. The third pebble is a wish for the future.