Quotes About Past

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper...

Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? …Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past

kindling all over with pleasure at the thought of the past.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me. The result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought.

The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...

As a child he had walked in Regent's Park—odd, he thought, hope the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places: and their fathers—a woman's always proud of her father.

GeçmiÅŸ güzeldir çünkü insan asla bir duyguyu yaÅŸad??? anda anlamaz. Duygu sonradan aç?l?p, geniÅŸler. Bu yüzden de ÅŸimdiyle ilgili tamama ermiÅŸ duygular?m?z yoktur, sadece geçmiÅŸle ilgili vard?r.

Ninguém precisa se surpreender que Orlando tenha se sobressaltado, levado a mão ao coração e empalidecido. Pois pode haver revelação mais terrível do que constatar que este é o momento presente? Se sobrevivemos ao choque é apenas porque o passado nos protege de um lado e o futuro de outro.

Quién no piensa en el pasado en un jardín con hombres y mujeres tumbados bajo los árboles? ¿Acaso estos hombres y mujeres, estos fantasmas tumbados bajo los árboles, no son nuestro pasado, todo lo que queda de él..., nuestra felicidad, nuestra realidad?

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.

We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures -- when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met.

It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues.

Cuando procuro analizar mis propios anhelos, motivaciones y actos, me rindo ante una especie de imaginación retrospectiva que atiborra la facultad analítica que con infinitas alternativas bifurca incesantemente cada rumbo visualizado en la perspectiva enloquecedoramente compleja de mi pasado

GeçmiÅŸ en soylu yakacakt?r.

And speaking of evolution, can we imagine the origin and stepping stones and rejected mutations of Time? Has there ever been a "primitive" form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft, long, larval "now"?

Tengo la habilidad de verter torrentes de lágrimas evocando tempestades pasadas