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d116095 photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself... photography grief loss romance joy meaning past love fujifilm nikon kodak kodachrome super-8 canon photo capture film knowledge nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
f85bd10 At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past. present past Haruki Murakami
0ae7433 Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it -- fragmentary and uncertain though it is -- that distinguishes man from all other animals present human-being reality past Colin Wilson
618363b The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs. memories past reminiscence Beryl Markham
40f6e1b If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past? past Nassim Nicholas Taleb
30503c4 And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. past life love wisedom mistakes Khaled Hosseini
765476b The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. past life consciousness ghosts Hilary Mantel
0335e81 The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention. past Michel Faber
99e1f0f 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. memories past melancholy oblivion remembering memory Lois Lowry
4e4a4fa Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. understanding past life Jack Kerouac
0f44225 Sam was the only member of the party who had not been over the river before. He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front. future past stream feeling river J.R.R. Tolkien
9131fba 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. past Wallace Stegner
c4ceedd I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life? grief loss relationship reality past hope delusional delusional-love unreal loner delusion save hunger stalking misery hopeless frustration obsession waste unrequited-love sickness Donna Tartt
5591fe0 The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to. past Dan Simmons
cee1f69 The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards. past maurice refuge cowardice longing E.M. Forster
086cecb Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right? morality past philosophy Hunter S. Thompson
c2c626b Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material. present history past happiness Hermann Hesse
3984234 Before I can say , I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were -- inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. personality morality past family identity predispositions heritage personal-history values Wallace Stegner
efd305b Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on... places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills... a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future. photography earth television future past love cook-stove glow laundry traditional nikon kodak kodachrome cell-phone farm pie massachusetts grim country digital missing nostalgic small-town film peace texting Rebecca McNutt
cafde12 I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past. letting-go past moving-forward Margaret Atwood
5d545fd You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That's the past - or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same. future past Jean Rhys
cb7bcc5 The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves. past truth Julian Barnes
9081e7c Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. present past mindfulness Henry David Thoreau
b54f8fd If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. loss depression sorrow future fear past sadness woes woe complain bad bad-habit befall befell happen hoard mourn occurence predict tendency wallow much occur dragon Robin Hobb
77d2b56 In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises. present memories past west promises Wade Davis
10be694 "That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is "supposed to be"...'Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else." present fate good future honesty past destiny life truth aside complete forgo meant not part section set survive to decide done finish discover over end path be forget dead Robin Hobb
062fe67 Life on the run was filled with dreams, some at night during sleep, real dreams, and some when the mind was awake but drifting. Most were terrifying, the nightmares of the shadows growing bolder and larger. Others were pleasant wishes of a rosy future, free of the past. These were rare, Patrick had learned. Life on the run was life in the past. There was no closure past John Grisham
c5e3d00 The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door. past Kate Atkinson
43566df In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females. feminism history past equity femininity Nassim Nicholas Taleb
bb82bfd Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. future past instinct James Luceno
aee8537 I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories. memories past carmen-sternwood chessmen old-letters pictures the-hobart-arms so-noir-it-hurts philip-marlowe home radio Raymond Chandler
11c5078 "Oh, Myr," he chokes out. "I hate having to ask this of you..." He glances towards the car again, and I crouch down in the shadows, hoping it's too dark for him to see whether the window is open or closed. The woman pats his arm, cradling her hand against his elbow. "You know I'd do anything for you and Hil," she says. I like her voice. It's throaty and rich. "You'd do anything?" my father repeats numbly. "Even now? After -?" "Even now," the woman says firmly." kindness fear past love asking request help forgiveness guilt Margaret Peterson Haddix
e9bd55a No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary. future past sentimental wary Jean Rhys
698ea15 I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. memories past life ishmael-beah Ishmael Beah
181fc05 "We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not "we might have to eat the dog" poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor... poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They'd saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera... I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then... this mall doesn't even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it's depressing..." poverty future past cardboard coins washing-machine instamatic kodak cape-breton nova-scotia mcdonald-s camera digital birthday mall canada nostalgic shopping film poor insurance wishes dog nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
302c39c "I like you, Mallory. And God knows you deserve a hell of a lot better than me." He dipped his chin, laughing as he thrust his hand through his hair. "God. I suck at this. Can we just forget--" I snapped out of it. "You like me?" His gaze flew to mine. "Yeah, I do. And I know I've been with Paige and I'm not going to pretend that meant nothing, but it's not how I feel for you. Not remotely like how I feel for you. And it's not because of our past--because of you and I knowing each other for so long," he said, and the words kept coming out in a rush. "At first, I thought that was why--this attraction I have to you. I thought it was because of everything we'd shared. And then the night I came to your place and you fixed me up, I thought it was just this physical thing." Pink raced across his cheeks. "And it is most definitely a physical thing, but it wasn't just that. I think part of me knew that from the very first time you said my name." Now my pulse was pounding. He liked-liked me. Oh my God, this was unexpected. This was totally unplanned. It was an infinite, vast sea of unknown. "I know you deserve better, but I want to be better. I want to be for you." past mallory-dodge rider-stark better like Jennifer L. Armentrout
a95437d And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it. past old Zadie Smith
6dbf94d Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. photography time dream future past imagination life snapshot kodak-moment pause clear clarity worry moment regret nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
bde6804 As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. past stagnation Victor Hugo
7c390c5 It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced - and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. time past waste Carol Shields
963bcde Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely. past life Anne Tyler
7b3d2a9 Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. time history writing reality past change capture fade fled hold-on preserve write remember flower Robin Hobb
d839fda That's one benefit of travelling to your own future, and making the trip part of your past. time lessons future past philosophy decisions James A. Owen
3baf9b0 Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run? loss memories past love trip nostalgia Jeanette Winterson
8bba5f1 I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. solitude nature past John Fowles
c0ac46a We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. present time history past family life build-up chronology development generation-gap existentialism modernity Wallace Stegner
8936ab2 Die Vergangenheit war wie jene altmodischen, mit Krautern und Blumen gefullten Duftkissen, deren Aroma die Kleider durchdringt und an ihnen haften bleibt. past Anaïs Nin
e2116c9 Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best. past remembrance P.D. James
066ccbc The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. present history past Shashi Tharoor
ef83f19 We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing. past reflections John Banville
a3d5c36 Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding. struggle history learning past success solutions problems failure Jared Diamond
8e972dd "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change." past truth narrative physics Neil Postman
0b579c5 The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face. future beauty past sadness music heart moon everywhere intense ourselves ever feeling deep silver ending end christ sad John Fowles
2251afb To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past. past Ben Elton
3c0ed82 But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing. past Iris Murdoch
f279b1a Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. myth history past czech signs decode enigma symbols messages forgetting novel Milan Kundera
062097e "Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism." I nodded again. "Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been anointed they will say, 'He is a torturer.' You may follow the plow or the drum, but still you will hear, 'He is a torturer.' Do you understand that?" past education Gene Wolfe
01a4e9a If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future? present past Truman Capote
5ba49d1 To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days. history independence-day past Carol Ryrie Brink
d55c635 If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived. history passion goodness past life Elizabeth Kostova
b2d5e14 The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back. heroism future fear past fatigue variety imaginary enthusiasm ideals ease G.K. Chesterton
03b1582 Don't worry about the past and don't try to figure out the future thoughts past positive Garrison Keillor
3a16c34 Only one life, it will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last. jesus faith past god life soon one done christian last christ Elizabeth George
c26b98b In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. understanding racism history past blacks whites race-relations race James Baldwin
5a67d4b The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house. past Bono
fc29840 For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning--clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. past love bell hooks
3c0330f "Sweet Pocket, you mustn't ask about my life before I came here. What I am now, I have always been, and everything I am is here with you." "Sweet Thalia," said I. "That is a fiery flagon of dragon toss." future past humor life Christopher Moore
9e3f23a But in doing so---moving forward...---he's still dealing with the past. It's always strung out behind us, innit, attached to our arses like a roll of toilet paper we trail out of the bathroom, pointing the way to the giant shite we just took. It doesn't matter if we flushed it down; Everyone still knows what we did there. So its fine to say it's all done and you have no connection with the past, that you're a new person every second, but silly in my view to pretend that person isn't made of the old one. past humor philosophy Kevin Hearne
4d8a140 Od onog ondasnjeg covjeka ja sam se, i to upravo zbog onog dozivljaja, potpuno odvojio, promatram ga sa strane, sasvim mirno i hladno, i mogu ga opisati kao prijatelja o kojem znam mnogo i sve ono sto je bitno, ali ja uopce vise nisam taj covjek. Mogao bih pricati o njemu, prekoravati ga ili ga osudivati a da uopce ne osjetim da je on jednom bio sastavni dio mene. man self-awareness past Stefan Zweig
99c5c19 "I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly... they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them... if I were you I would stop smoking them." "Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes," Mandy pointed out. "Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties... for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes... but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you," Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea." grief loss depression past education cigar blast-from-the-past chain-smoke no-smoking vhs-tape retro depress deadly times disturbing smog haunting gray cancer spooky video creepy smoke cigarette tobacco pollution attack health eerie scary sick knowledge trapped self-help horror Rebecca McNutt
d943731 "But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the I have to worry about the truth that can be And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?" says Alsana, with something of a grin. "Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around. But the past is made of more than words, dearie. We married old men, you see? These bumps"--Alsana pats them both --"they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up. Just look in my garden - birds at the coriander every bloody day..." sanity future honesty past truth pregnancy relativism worrying talking Zadie Smith
f2adbdc They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live. past shadow Milan Kundera
dfc21eb "The influence of the future on the past," said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly." influence future past Adolfo Bioy Casares
5c6cdf0 I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all. time youth past Margaret Atwood
089fe34 Past and future were out of her hands. One was finished and couldn't be undone. The other was beyond imagining. future past Francine Rivers
bb347ad There are some things in the past that... that just aren't meant to be viewed. past found-footage met viewed Rebecca McNutt
5f86509 The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence. time past london P.D. James
0978c6c What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any. relationships past research Wallace Stegner
ff32ec8 Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. madness past undoing study mystery obsession H.P. Lovecraft
17e41ab Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks. present thoughts past thinking C.G. Jung
0b83ef0 In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time. time history past the-united-states generations Sarah Vowell
2e6f423 You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight--and smile at your own past sorrows. past secrets John Fowles
b4217ae "... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come" past meetings Dan Simmons
bc78915 A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless. past belong rootless speciesless irritation belonging english roots language england John Fowles
c372ea1 What if I turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from. learning past looking-back Wallace Stegner
1c3e4d9 Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. pain grief past change-of-scene changes-in-life loss-of-love grit rebirth heartache new old life-after-death Joseph Conrad
1ae57e7 Dwelling on the past only defeated her chances for changing the future. future past Francine Rivers
4e6c136 Joyce is right about history being a nightmare--but it may be the nightmare from which no one awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. past James Baldwin
fe75603 Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face. past islands Julian Barnes
71b98ee while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together. present future past life thoughts-on-life thought-provoking Monica Ali
7d1e54c The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity. future past tradition G.K. Chesterton
87bba46 ...it is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. future past forefathers G.K. Chesterton
c0075e9 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. past Lawrence Lessig
c243f3a I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable present past Peter Ackroyd
f84c7f1 Their message will never be decoded... because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. myth history past czech signs decode enigma symbols messages forgetting novel Milan Kundera
ad177bf A lady with a past has nothing to lose. But a woman with a future can't be too careful. woman past Jayne Ann Krentz
6c21cdc Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read. past particles knowledge Philip Pullman
50565b2 It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel... present past Tad Williams
610ce95 "Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind." words history thoughts memories past memory Gregory Maguire
796bd68 He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present. present time past past-and-present Larry McMurtry
586463a This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333) time history past the-united-states speech Don DeLillo
d52bce4 You can't let your past write the future past Janny Wurts
71e40f1 One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. past Iris Murdoch
c87a35b It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past. past Victor Hugo
97c866a Where would we be without our painful childhoods? pain humorous depression past humor sad-but-true sad trauma psychology Rebecca McNutt
86b39fd Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. present past the-west regret Cormac McCarthy
76a5921 "I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, "the present," disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!" present history past Edward St. Aubyn
138f23e "I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time--I mean, ever since I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers--I mean, both of them fucking like " "Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history." war sex history past William Styron
3a91b1d Fool, there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here. future past move sense today play regret Robin Hobb
4a4a799 Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical function? If not, it would be perfectly all right to accept the approach of the end, even without thinking about it, sitting in front of our TV screens (in the shelter of our electronic fortifications), waiting for someone to while meantime things go however they go. And to hell with what will come. responsibility history future past religion hope life end-of-time end-of-the-world entertainment Umberto Eco
b33237a That's where the raiders would come from, and where Wales begins. That's where the world starts to turn blue. past raiders stories Kevin Crossley-Holland
993401b "The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial. The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea." -- time fiction past truth relaxation past-and-present rapid-change historical-fiction nostalgia Marshall McLuhan
3d82d50 One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down. past past-life yesterdays Glen Cook
da671c4 I think in some ways it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows. Keep marching, boys and girls. Keep marching. past tomorrow Rodman Philbrick
cdf2d84 A une epoque de sa vie, il y avait de cela de nombreuses annees, elle avait perdu sa foi en Dieu. Elle l'avait maudit, hai, accuse d'etre responsable de tous les maux de la terre. Mais le mal n'etait pas une creation de Dieu. L'homme avait invente le mal. Finalement, elle avait reussi a pardonner a Dieu. secret past love secret-affair united-kingdom turkey grandmother istanbul london suspense Barbara Taylor Bradford
d9736dd What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible. silence past Azar Nafisi
db87afa The past is what you take with you. past Kate Atkinson
69584a3 He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his, past memory Jhumpa Lahiri
ed6b4c6 What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far? memories past patrick-melrose Edward St. Aubyn
c35d2ad The past is magnetic. It draws us in. past Jeanette Winterson
95906b4 I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours. writing past obsession Wallace Stegner
9cadc6e 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. past stories Chuck Palahniuk
8642fea Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were. past nostalgia Roxane Gay
7a74f9a You can't let the past ruin your future, I changed over in my mind. past Maria V. Snyder
e3496ff "One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad that you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh." In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it..., rather than imagining a better future and acting on that." memories past identity Thomas L. Friedman
40ede5f 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. past David Goodis
a70dfb9 "The past is what it is--good and bad, it's written and unchanging. And there's solace to be had in that." Tears pricked her eyes. "What do you mean?" There was a long pause. "The good parts are more luminous because you can trust them. And the bad parts can't get any more tragic for precisely the same reason. The past is safe because it is indelible." past life J.R. Ward
06105bf It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light. past traumatic trauma David Baldacci
ee0f2cf Madre mia, cuantos castillos en el aire haciamos, escribio Micha mas tarde. La situacion habria podido seguir asi enternamente. Era como para vomitar sin pausa, pero nosotros nos divertiamos a lo grande. Eramos todos tan listos, tan leidos, teniamos tanto interes..., pero el resultado era estupido. Nos precipitabamos hacia el futuro, pero eramos tan del pasado... Dios mio, que ridiculos eramos, y ni siquiera nos dabamos cuenta. past reflexions Thomas Brussig
f6761a3 Akh, vek mifov i legend. Sharleman', rytsarstvo, gornyi Pireneiskii peresheek, budushchee Evropy, budushchee vsego Khristianskogo mira na chashe vesov, geroicheskii ar'ergard, rog zovushchii na bitvu, chelovecheskaia zhizn', pust' sama po sebe nichtozhnaia, pust' vsego lish' igrushka v rukakh sluchaia, no tem ne menee vbroshena v stolknovenie bolee znachitel'nykh sil. Byt' peshkoi deistvitel'no mnogoe znachilo vo vremena, kogda na shakhmatnoi doske stoiali rytsari, episkopy i koroli, kogda peshka mogla mechtat' o tom, chtoby stat' korolevoi, kogda chernye srazhalis' protiv belykh i nad vsemi byl Bog. Ponimaete teper', chto my poteriali? Teper' est' tol'ko peshki i obe storony igraiut serymi. past Julian Barnes
5867f9c Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron. time loss past William Timothy Murray
b812313 Tai, ka galiausiai prisimeni, ne visada yra tas pats, ka patyrei past Julian Barnes
b6bc291 O passado e aquilo que transportamos connosco past Kate Atkinson
e80cdb9 "The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. [...] Oannes did not do his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu--the "Seven Sages"--who were said to have lived "before the flood" (a cataclysmic global deluge features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural, building and engineering skills." humanity past archeology flood seven-sages cataclysm civilization Graham Hancock
05803b9 The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was. future past perception Jeanette Winterson
b70f533 Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run? loss memories past love reminisce trip nostalgia Jeanette Winterson
5040061 The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now. future past Anne Morrow Lindbergh
2f2a032 The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of. present time history past reflection introspection memory Iris Murdoch
13c70cf Die Freunde, an die ich denke, sind in der Zeit gefangen wie in einem Film. Sie (viele von ihnen sind tot, verschollen) sind in dem Alter, in dem ich sie zuletzt gesehen habe; ich bezweifle, dass sie mich jetzt wiedererkennen wurden. friends past inspirational vergangenheit remembering memory Alberto Manguel
66d6f11 I was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity. Morrie, who could no longer dance, swim, bathe, or walk; Morrie, who could no longer answer his own door, dry himself after a shower, or even roll over in bed. How could he be so accepting? I watched him struggle with a fork, picking at a piece of tomato, missing it the first two times - a pathetic scene, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college. ill struggle live past life presence pity dying Mitch Albom
4a66aea I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. understanding india past wrongs Shashi Tharoor
47b34a1 That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past. past Ruth Reichl
63ecf54 Tu eres tu propio enemigo, Ryan. Empieza por perdonarte, si no te perdonas vas a vivir siempre prisionero del pasado, castigado por la memoria, que es subjetiva. past perdón memoria enemy pasado forgiveness memory Isabel Allende
d545521 The past is a novel, written by Fate, weaving the same themes: love and its glory, hate and its prisoners, the soul and its price. Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it's our will alone that leads us to one or the other. fate past hope love glory prison Gregory David Roberts
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