Quotes about the past

Sometimes we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and the kind of message enfolded in it.'''

I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect.

I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. (p. 309)

Of all fruitless errands, sending a tear to look after a day that is gone is the most fruitless.

Imagination was the great cozener of the past.

Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.

America is a faith, perhaps pancakes its sacrament. Opportunity comes to those who put away the disadvantages of family or circumstance and entrust themselves to the future. The point of the American story is simple enough for a child, particularly an immigrant child, to grasp: The past holds no sway in America.

Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.

The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done.

[...], old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.