579 quotes found
“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
“(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.”
“The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.”
“The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”
“I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story. (David Copperfield)But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those ...”
“The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.”
“The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.”
“It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.”
“There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.”
“The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.”
“To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves...”
“The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”
“The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.”
“..the past kept pricking at me and I knew that all the elements of those nineteen days in July were astir within me, like phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kep them burie...”
“[The past] has a way of hanging around, demanding we understand it and weave it into ourselves so that we can go on.”
“(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.”
“When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.”
“I realize that I dont know where to start. Not because Im unsure of my story, but because Im not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?”
“Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine ...”
“The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Childre...”
