“Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.”
“Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ( The past was her best friend )”
“A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others.”
“Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don t do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.”
“There’s something in my voice that brings him back to me, overrides his buzz. ‘Gaby’—all traces of playfulness have gone—‘if anything ever happens to me, you’ll be fine. You’re strong enough to look after yourself. I hate to admit it, but you don’t need me. Never did.’ A smile. ‘But listen, nothing is going to happen today. It’s all good.’ ‘Jude, we’re high enough up to get a nose bleed.’ ‘So come with me.’ I blink. ‘Fuck off.’ ‘I mean it. We can do this together.’ He raises his eyebrows at the girl who checked his harness. She nods. I risk looking over the side. There’s a river far beneath us. So far down we can’t hear it. My entire body goes numb. ‘You’ve got about thirty seconds and then I’m going on my own.’ What a choice: watch my brother jump out of this car or put aside my own fear and go with him. Share the recklessness. Why didn’t we go to Paris? We’d be arguing over where to buy cheese right now. Adrenaline begins to burn through me. ‘Screw it.’ Jude breaks into a wide smile. ‘Seriously?’ I glance at the yawning space beneath us. ‘Hurry up before I change my mind.”
“Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.”
“I had run to boarding school to escape myself. But I couldn t escape who I was or what I d done, no matter how fast or far I ran. The crows were just a reminder of that. They wanted back in. My past wasn t done with me. Not yet.”
“And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize… that this is where your life is.”
“Oui, je pense que tout ce qui vient du passé n est pas dépassé. Faire soi-même possède quelque chose de très beau; prendre le temps, c est important. Oui, je pense que tout va trop vite. On parle trop vite. On réfléchit trop vite, quand on réfléchit! On envoie des mails, des textos sans se relire, on perd lélégance de l orthographe, la politesse, le sens des choses. (p. 94)”
“Trzeba zdobyć się na odwagę i zostawić cienie przeszłości za sobą, patrzeć w przód, przed siebie.”
“I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling his heart beating against me. I wish I could gather time around us, slowing the minutes, making them last a lifetime. “I was born on the island kingdom of Ghedda,” I whisper. This is a story I never told even to you, Habiba. I tell it now only because I cannot bear to leave him without the truth, knowing only half of me. I raise my head and meet his eyes. “That was more than four thousand years ago. I was the eldest daughter of a wise and generous king.” Aladdin stares at me, his eyes soft and curious, encouraging me to go on. “When I was seventeen, I became queen of Ghedda. In those days, the jinn were greater in number, and the Shaitan held greater sway over the realms of men. He demanded we offer him twenty maidens and twenty warriors in sacrifice, in return for fair seas and lucrative trade. I was young and proud and desired, above all else, to be a fair ruler. I would not bow to his wishes, so he shook our island until it began to fall into the sea.” I shudder, and Aladdin draws me closer. “I climbed to the alomb at the top of the Mountain of Tongues, and there offered myself to the Shaitan, if he would only save my city from the sea.” My voice falls to a whisper, little more than a ripple on the water. “So he took me and made me jinn and put me in the lamp. And then he caused the Mountain of Tongues to erupt, and Ghedda was lost to fire. For he had sworn only to save my people from the sea, not from flame.”
“Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language; While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.”
“That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.”
“Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it ll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.”
“Nostalgia is your brain s way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past”
“Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl.”
“When you cling to something from the past, your hands cannot be open to receive the gifts of the future.”