“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”
“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.”
“Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.”
“Everything that is past is either a learning experience to grow on, a beautiful memory to reflect on, or a motivating factor to act upon.”
“Experience, which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I ve found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; experience, which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; experience, which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.”
“She d cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn t feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.”
“The past, he thought, is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.”
“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
“What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you re so wrecked it s hard to believe you ever were a child?”
“It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that past which ought not to be stirred up.”
“My sweet lordy, lordy. It built up to the Summer of Love down by the Psychedelic Shop on Haight-Ashbury when the sunshine poured in mellow yellow and the Age of Aquarius was rising and the tribes gathered in the rain, in the park and everything and everyone fringed the bottoms of their jeans and put flowers in their hair.”
“My father walked around the house with me. It was smaller than I had expected - as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are - but also duller and dustier. Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays.”
“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of. But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing— is run.”
“But this was what happened when you didn t want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.”
“No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.”
“Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we d never be able to choose our own destiny.”
“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.”