Past Quotes

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

~ Martin Amis

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

~ Julio Cortázar

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

~ Amy Tan

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

~ J.m. Barrie

He remembered how nice the kids at Camp Half-Blood had been to him after the war with Kronos. Great job, Nico! Thanks for bringing the armies of the Underworld to save us! Everybody smiled. They all invited him to sit at their table. After about a week, his welcome wore thin. Campers would jump when he walked up behind them. He would emerge from the shadows at the campfire, startle somebody and see the discomfort in their eyes: Are you still here? Why are you here? It didn’t help that immediately after the war with Kronos, Annabeth and Percy had started dating … Nico set down his fartura. Suddenly it didn’t taste so good.

~ Rick Riordan

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory

~ James Stephens

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

~ Amy Tan

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

~ Marcel Proust

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

~ Frans Kellendonk

And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind

~ Jacques Roubaud

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

~ Michel Faber

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

~ Aimee Bender

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

~ Wallace Stegner

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

~ Victoria Moran

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.

~ Julio Cortázar

The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.

~ Cara Black

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars - she paused at remembered sweetness - we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer.

~ Melissa Marr

The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.

~ Ivan Klíma

For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.

~ Eduardo Galeano

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. (The Mysteries of the Joy Rio)

~ Tennessee Williams

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things our, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually.

~ Meša Selimović

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are so afraid of being pulled under the water with the anchor. Scared of letting these memories swirl around our mind as they should. As tragic as it might feel, it’s evident that the sea we are drowning in is the same sea we were born into.

~ Trevor J. Freeman

We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.

~ Josephine Hart

I began to curse the past for passing.

~ Mara Rostov

Now when the flowers are in full bloom,It is the ashes from the past that hidden loom.

~ Selina A. Mahmood

She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she’d made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn’t figure out where the hell time had gone.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch

There are events in one's life which, no matter how remote, never fade from memory

~ Jim Corbett

When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. (The past was her best friend )

~ Erik Pevernagie

Memory is sweet.Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.

~ Li-Young Lee

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

~ Rabih Alameddine

The more she tried to forget, the more she remembered.

~ T.k. Kiser

It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.

~ David Baldacci

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.

~ Mordecai Richler