Quotes About Past

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Then she rubbed the cat's fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.

Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don't feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me. •

The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.

She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past

We can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind, just as we can remember what happened in the past, but we can't remember the future. Not only that, but we can remember recent events much more clearly than long past events, captured neatly by the visual metaphor in which the past lines up before us, the most recent events being closest so that they clearly perceived (remembered), with long/past events far in the distance, remembered and perceived with difficulty.

Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher. The soft pasting noises of the rebel billposters remind us of Oklahoma, where everything is still the same.

anachronisms.

Old books had always filled Brunetti with nostalgia for centuries in which he had not lived.

There was no vanity here, only the calm acceptance of her own worth and of her own talent, and he knew enough about her past to realize how hard that must have been to achieve.

Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back–not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.

how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

The light of long ago is different from the light of today, and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever

The human mind, I take it, must have either comfort in the past or hope in the future," he continued, "otherwise it is in danger.

It was so long in the past that it should not have mattered, but it did. It did. Once he had realized that these words and words like them were the truth, once they had broken through his defensive barrier of denial, then they became a part of him, burning their way into his soul.

Todos éramos expertos en idealizar lugares, y tras el 11 de septiembre sólo nos quedaba un sitio que idealizar, un sitio que nunca podría desilusionarnos: el pasado.

In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.

Quero fruir o presente e considerar o passado como o passado. Você tem razão: os homens sofreriam menos se não se aplicassem tanto (e Deus sabe por que eles são assim!)a invocar os males indos e vividos, em vez de esforçar-se por tornar suportável um presente medíocre.