Past Quotes - Page 16

Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

Tennessee Williams

Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.

Catherynne M. Valente

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years.

David Goodis

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Gaston Bachelard

I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable

Peter Ackroyd

She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.

Lois Lowry

From one moment to another memory steps back to rediscover the past

Munia Khan

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

Sol Luckman

The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death.

Upton Sinclair

My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past

Munia Khan

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances.

Ilya Ehrenburg

Music replays the past memories, awaken our forgotten worlds and make our minds travel.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

Paul Fussell

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...

Frederick Buechner

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin

... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Marcel Proust

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.

Marcel Proust

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

Marcel Proust

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain 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) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Marcel Proust

Fear no more as long as her memory surrounds you like a ghost…cry no more as long as she weeps for you like a willow.

Munia Khan

Putting the past behind you isn't like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own.

Maggie Mitchell

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

Mordecai Richler

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

David Baldacci

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

T.K. Kiser

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights)

Bill Bernico

No person can walk all alone because to walk all alone one must have no memories at all from the past!

Mehmet Murat ildan

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

Rabih Alameddine

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

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

Jim Corbett

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

Lidia Yuknavitch

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

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

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

Josephine Hart

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Roubaud

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

Frans Kellendonk

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

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

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Past Quotes - Page 16

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