Quotes About Past

Never seek the wind in the field—it is useless to try and find what is gone." Your

Never seek the wind in the field. It is useless to try and find what is gone.

his old school that if there'd been

They're just memories now. Time to write them off.

Olivia lit a cigarette and said, God, if I worried about running into old boyfriends, I couldn't go anywhere!

Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.

I hadn't gotten old enough to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

and was struck by the next image I saw. Francesca's arm held the door open for Mike, whose bare arms were strapped around a dusty taped box with my name scribbled on it. My past giving way to my future, which embraced my past. Mike

Was alles mag da wohl noch im Dunkel seines Gedächtnisses warten, aber nie wieder aus der Abstellkammer hervorgeholt werden, bevor der Laden irgendwann endgültig zugemacht wird?

We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of—but we never love again.

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago, has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago.

each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories

Most certainly not. Why face this with honesty and directness? It is so much more fun to dance around the truth, dodge the reality of the situation, which is that you are in love with this man, you share some kind of unhappy past with him...and that he has feelings for you, as well. Why would you ever wish to deal with that head on?

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.

He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.

Back then she had only wanted to shut the door to it, to be apart from Subhash and Bela. She'd been incapable of cherishing what she'd had.

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.

Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.