There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.
There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts...memories can't be enough.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.
I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.
Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.
I collect the most valuable thing in the world—free time. But unlike other priceless things, I don’t need a safe to keep it safe, because I keep all my free time in the past, where nobody can touch it—not even me. My collection grows larger every day.
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.
I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.
For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.
Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.
Et voilà, mon passé n’est plus qu’un trou énorme. Mon présent: cette bonne au corsage noir qui rêve près du comptoir, ce petit bonhomme. Tout ce que je sais de ma vie, il me semble que je l’ai appris dans des livres.
It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.
The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.
