Quotes About Past

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

My loyalty to the past—my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.

The beauty of modern cities consists in a sense of their power, cruelty, impersonality, massiveness, + variety (as in New York or London) seen against the architectural vestiges of a beautiful past.

To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.

An event in the present evokes past sensations. But science couldn't explain how a foolish heart had the power to overrule common sense.

Memories are like a series of locked doors, and once you manage to get one open, it leads to another, and then another and so on. The hard part is finding the key to that first lock and getting through it.

Maybe that was why the term "old flame" had been invented. Somebody always got burned.

E soprattutto sapeva che per quanto ci si perda nel presente, per quanto si creda che il passato è stato cancellato, esso ritorna. Ritorna a giudicarti. E tu giudichi lui, il passato, nel paesaggio morale della memoria.

It isn't that nothing is left. It is that what remains is such an old sad ghost of the thing that used to be, and he can't bear lying down with the vestiges.

Define history. Was it the sequence of factual past events, the stories about the factual sequence of past events, or the interpretation of the stories about past events?

My pastor had told me that forgiveness doesn't mean justifying or condoning what he did, but it would begin the process of freeing me from the past, and it would offer a lost person the opportunity for redemption.

I kept my secrets, telling myself that they were the past. I ignored the ones that were still alive. The ones that touched every current breath, the ones I couldn't even tell myself.

I think we're losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here," said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

A man is what he is, not what he used to be. —Yiddish proverb

Someone's past was happy in their shadow.

There was beauty to be seen if one simply took the time to behold it. The past was not greater than the present.

Forgiveness is not about letting someone off the hook. It's about freeing yourself from the pain and anger of the past.

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Life is so short," I said sighing, "the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?" "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back

some memories, too, might better be forgotten. didn't Obasan once say, "it is better to forget"? what purpose is served by hauling forth the jar of inedible food? if it is not seen, it does not horrify. what is past recall is past pain.

What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.