the-past

The day history will die and lose its essence with time, memories will not only die, but they shall also surely be forgotten with time!

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives__n insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

For some, excavating the past isn__ an adventure, it__ more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

anytime you speak to anybody, remember somebody

You can't judge the present by the past. Each day is different, and you live it differently.

The past always wishes to play its part in the unfolding drama of life.

He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

What if you were wrong? What if everything you ever believed was a lie? What if you missed your opportunity because you didn't know your worth? What if you settled on familiar, but God was trying to give you something better? What if you decided not to go backwards, but forward? What if doing what you have never done before was the answer to everything that didn't make sense? What if the answer wasn't to be found in words, but in action? What if you found the courage to do what you really wanted to do and doing it changed your whole life?

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too__eave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

Though a new cloth makes you look new, when you see the old cloths, you remember the old life

Keep waving someone who has closed his eyes only when you understand the fact that you are only exhausting your energy with the hope that one day he will open his eyes and see you waving him!