Quotes About Past

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

History is a madman's museum.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

They live in the opposite of the past. I said, You mean the future? No, Ry. The opposite of the past is the present. Anyone can live in a past that is gone or a future that does not exist. The opposite of either position is the present.

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

and what is memory but a rope slung across time?

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

I'm living on my memories like a cheap has-been.

I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was.

Yes, the past is another country, but once that we can visit and once there we can bring back the things we need.

HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present.

But the rags and the ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity.

So the past, because it is the past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.

If haunting is anything, perhaps that's what it is; time in the wrong place.

We are ever looking forward or backward, ruminating on what is past, and can return no more, or anticipating the future, which may never arrive; there is nothing solid to which the heart can attach itself, neither have we here below any pleasures that are lasting.

If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about

I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.

Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.